Stata Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

While I first learned to do statistical analyses in SPSS, STATA has far more versatility and advanced functionality. It can do basically anything a professional quantitative social scientist such as myself could need, and I am always discovering new features.

You have to learn the command codes to get started, which is basically like learning a programming language. I wish STATA had a better autofill system like R Studio.

Stata is an incredibly powerful tool. Most people will only ever scratch the surface of what it is capable of (myself included), but the good news is that means it almost certainly has the functionality that you need. I spent time using both SPSS and SAS prior to switching to STATA, and I've never regretted the switch. While the learning curve is steep, I found it to be less so than in those other tools. I love being able to easily search for and install additional functionality, and I love that there is an extremely robust wealth of tutorials and help guides found online.

Not cheap, and there is a steep learning curve. Also, reverse compatibility of data files is an issue when sharing between colleagues who may not be running the latest version (which, in my experience as an academic, is common given the steep price of upgrading).

What can I say? Who likes using stats software? Not many folks but this one is easy to use. It's cheap and effective. it has an easy user interface and you can import your data from excel. Sometimes it's a bit tricky to get everything in the table just right but once you get the hang of it, it's not a big deal. Everything is available from the drop down menus.

Sometimes it is difficult to get things just right when starting out. You'll do something and think this is how it should be done but then your data entry doesn't work right. It can be fussy to be a novice user.

Thank you for your response!

Stata is another statistical software that can be used for analysis when doing research papers and analysis for research at your work. It is used especially for large data handling and for research including surveys. I have used Stata both at my office as well as a student and it is great for handling large data files. When you are trained to use Stata it is very convenient to use. For instance, stata requires a lot of shortcuts and codes to be able to conduct the right tests. These shortcuts enable you to find the tests and data needed and it produces fast results when the right shortcuts and codes are used. It also keeps a log of all the codes used to produce given tests.

Stata even though it can handle large data files, it is not very user friendly. If you are familiar with the workings of stata it can be very easy to use, however when you are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of how it works it can take up a lot of time for you to work with the data in the software. If you do not put it the right prompt in the codes you will produce a lot of errors coming up in your log and it can be very frustrating.

I use Stata in my most quantitative projects where the used data is small in size. It's always my go-in software when I need to fit a regression or deal with simple statistical analysis. Stata has both GUI and coding environments so It's super practical for users who do/don't like coding. Stata is cheaply priced compared with SAS, therefore it's mainly used for research rather than industry purposes.

First of all Stata is not workable with high dimensional data sets unless the RAM is big enough. Secondly, Stata community is not large, so finding appropriate pieces of advice can be challenging. And at last but not al least the software is priced higher, one can have the same results with Python or R which are free of charge.

Thank you for your feedback! As for finding advice, have you looked into Statalist, The Stata Forum? A great place to discuss Stata and statistics. Free to register at https://www.statalist.org.