{{cleanup|reason=unencyclopedic copy of citizendium article|date=February 2013}}
'''Free statistical software''' is a practical alternative to commercial packages. Many Inof general,the free statisticalto softwareuse givesprograms resultsaim thatto arebe thesimilar samein asfunction theto resultscommercial frompackages, commercialin programs.that Manythey ofare thegeneral statistical packages arethat fairlyperform easya tovariety learn,of using menustatistical systemsanalyses. Many othersother arefree command-driven.to Theseuse packagesprograms comewere fromdesigned aspecifically varietyfor ofparticular sourcesfunctions, includinglike [[government]]sfactor analysis, [[University|universities]]power analysis in sample size calculations, classification and privateregression trees, or analysis of missing individualsdata.
SomeMany packagesof arethe developedfree forto specificuse purposespackages (e.g.,are timefairly serieseasy analysis,to [[factor analysis]]learn, calculatorsusing formenu probability distributions, etcsystems.),whileMany others are generalcommand-driven. packages,Still with a variety of statistical procedures. Othersothers are meta-packages or statistical computing environments, which allow the user to code completely new statistical procedures. ThisThese articlepackages iscome from a reviewvariety of thesources, generalincluding statistical[[government]]s, packages[[University|universities]], and private individuals.
This article is primarily a review of the general statistical packages.
