Seven options a researcher on a Mac will actually consider in 2026, with what each is genuinely best at and where each one falls down. We make one of these, and we have tried to write the table we would have wanted before we did. Where a competitor is the better answer, it says so.
One thing worth clearing up first. Running natively on Apple Silicon used to separate these packages and no longer does. SPSS has been native since version 32.0.1, and Stata, jamovi, JASP and Prism were already there. Choose on what the software is designed to help you produce, not on the chip.
| Cost | Best at | Weakest at | Fits | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quanta | $79.99 a year, or $179.00 for everything | APA 7 reporting, reliability and scales, automatic assumption checks | No scripting language; Mac only; fixed procedure list | Applied social science with manuscripts to write |
| SPSS | High per seat, usually via an institution | Breadth, syntax reproducibility, institutional ubiquity | Cost without a site licence; manual APA formatting; SEM needs Windows-only AMOS | Departments that standardized on it years ago |
| Stata | High per seat, tiered | Econometrics, panel data, survey weights, do-file reproducibility | Command language to learn; overkill for simple survey work | Economics, epidemiology, public health |
| jamovi | Free, open source | Value, R modules, teaching, cross-platform | No report layer; community support only | Students, instructors, anyone on a budget |
| JASP | Free, open source | Bayesian analysis, open science workflows, APA-styled tables | Narrower frequentist depth than the paid packages | Bayesian work and methods teaching |
| GraphPad Prism | Subscription per seat | Publication figures, curve fitting, nonlinear regression | Little support for scales, reliability or factor analysis | Life sciences and laboratory work |
| R | Free | Unlimited method coverage, reproducible scripts, packages | Time cost, package maintenance, manual table assembly | Methodologists and anyone who already writes code |
Quanta or SPSS. Both treat reliability, item-total statistics and factor analysis as core. Quanta produces the APA 7 table directly; SPSS gives you more procedures and a syntax record. If cost matters and neither of those decides it, jamovi does this work for free.
Stata, and it is not close. Quanta includes multilevel models at the Advanced tier, but panel estimation and survey design are Stata's core competence.
JASP. It is free and it is the strongest option here for Bayesian work. Quanta reports Bayes factors alongside frequentist tests but does not offer full Bayesian estimation.
Prism. Nothing else on this list is built for that work.
R. Any fixed application eventually runs out of procedures; R does not.
jamovi, JASP or R, all free and all genuinely usable for real research. We would rather point you there than sell you something you do not need.
This is the most common reason researchers arrive here. Quanta is $79.99 a year at one price for everyone, with no academic, commercial or module tiers, and it reads your existing .sav files. jamovi and JASP are free alternatives for the same situation.
We make Quanta, so treat the Quanta row with the scepticism it deserves and check it. The claim we will defend is accuracy: Quanta is validated against R, lavaan, mice, SPSS and NIST reference datasets, and the report is published with the citable DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21894733 so the work can be checked rather than believed.
What we will not claim is that Quanta is the most capable statistics package on the Mac. It is not. SPSS and Stata are broader, R has no ceiling, and jamovi and JASP cost nothing. Quanta is built for one specific researcher: applied, on a Mac, with a manuscript due and no site licence. If that is not you, one of the other six on this list probably is the better answer.