SPCVisualsComparisons
Written to be useful when we are the wrong answer, because you will find out either way and it is cheaper for both of us if it happens now.
A Minitab alternative for small factories
Minitab is the better statistics package — and usually the wrong tool for a plant that needs live charts on the floor, not a study on a laptop. An honest comparison.
Read →What Minitab costs, and what you get for it
Minitab's list prices, taken from its own pricing page and dated, plus the part that decides the bill — it is priced per named user, per year, and the modules are extra.
Read →SPC software alternatives — WinSPC, InfinityQS and the rest
The established SPC packages, who owns them now, how they are sold, and the size of plant each is built for — including the two brands that turn out to be one vendor.
Read →Gage R&R in Minitab — how to run it, and a free alternative
The full ANOVA Gage R&R procedure in Minitab, menu by menu, including the interaction term most people accidentally drop — plus a free browser tool that runs the same analysis when you do not have a licence to hand.
Read →SPC charts without Excel
Excel can draw a control chart. It cannot keep the limits still, alert you when a rule trips, or survive its author leaving. Here is what actually breaks.
Read →X̄-R chart in Google Sheets vs SPC Visuals
How to build a correct X̄-R chart in Google Sheets, including the formulas and the A2 constant — and the three things it still will not do.
Read →SPC software for a single production line
Most SPC software is sold to plants with fifty lines and priced accordingly. What a single line actually needs, and what it should cost.
Read →Free SPC software — what you actually give up
There is genuinely good free SPC software. An honest look at what each option costs you in time, risk or capability, from someone who sells the paid kind.
Read →What a comparison page here is for
Every page in this list was written to be read by somebody who has not decided yet, and several of them end with "not us". That is deliberate. The alternatives on this list — Minitab, Excel, Google Sheets, the free SPC packages — are not strawmen. Minitab is a better statistics package than this will ever be. Excel is on every desk already. A comparison that pretends otherwise is discovered in the first ten minutes of a trial, and then nothing else on the site gets believed either.
The question underneath all of them
Almost every comparison here turns on the same distinction, so it is worth stating once. A statistics package answers a question you have already asked: you export the readings, run the study, read the number, write the report. A control chart answers a question nobody has asked yet — it sits there and tells you when something changed. Those are different jobs, and a tool built well for one is usually built badly for the other.
So the useful question is not "which is better". It is how long after a process shifts do you find out. If the answer is "when someone next runs the study", a desktop package is fine and cheaper than anything with a subscription attached. If the answer needs to be "within the shift", a study on a laptop cannot get you there no matter how good its statistics are.
Where each of these is genuinely the right answer
- Minitab — designed experiments, regression, capability studies for a PPAP, anything where the analysis is the deliverable. Also: an auditor who expects to see it.
- Excel or Google Sheets — one chart, once, for a meeting on Thursday. The guides show the formulas, and they work.
- Free SPC software — a single characteristic, one person watching it, no need for anyone else to see the same chart.
- Something like this — several characteristics, more than one person, and a chart that has to keep being right after the person who built it has moved on.
How to check any of it
Do not take the comparison's word for it. The free tools run the same engine the product runs, with no signup and nothing stored — paste your own readings into one and see whether the numbers match what your current tool says. If they disagree, that disagreement is worth understanding before any of these pages matter.