SPCVisualsMost pages that rank for this question will not tell you the number. This one starts with it.
All figures below are Minitab's own US list prices, read from minitab.com/en-us/try-buy on 25 August 2026. Prices change and ours is not the authoritative copy — check the source before quoting it at anyone. Local currency, tax and volume terms are settled in Minitab's cart or by its sales team, not here.
The list prices
| Plan | List price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Solution Center Core | $2,394 / year | The one marked Most Popular. Named user, online and desktop. |
| Solution Center Analytics | $2,593.50 / year | Core plus the analytics tier. |
| Solution Center Copilot | $2,793 / year | The AI-assisted tier. |
| Any module | $528 / year each | Twelve of them. Each requires a Core licence underneath. |
Two structural facts matter more than any of those numbers.
It is per named user, per year. Not per site, not per line, not per plant. A second person who needs to open Minitab is a second subscription. This is the single largest driver of what an SPC programme actually costs, and it is the part that gets missed when a budget is built from the headline price.
Several things you may assume are included are modules. The twelve add-ons each cost $528 a year on top of Core, and the list includes a Measurement System Analysis Module, a Sample Size Module and a Reliability Module. If you arrived here from a Gage R&R problem, that is the line to check against your quote before comparing anything to anything.
There is no perpetual licence on that page. Everything offered is a subscription. If you are carrying a memory of a one-off purchase from some years ago, that is what changed, and it is why the question gets asked so often.
What that works out to
One Core seat is $2,394 a year. A small quality department — an engineer, a technician and someone in the lab — is three seats, so $7,182 a year, before a single module. Add the MSA module for the two people running gauge studies and it is $8,238.
That is not an argument that Minitab is overpriced. Thirty years of validated statistical software, used as evidence in regulated submissions, is not a thing that ought to be cheap. It is an argument that the seat count, not the sticker price, is what you are actually buying, and that a quote should be built from how many people need to open it rather than from the number at the top of the page.
What we cost, and where the comparison is not flattering to us
Our line plan is €169 a month, which is roughly one Minitab seat a year. So on a straight one-person, one-tool comparison, we are not meaningfully cheaper, and any page telling you otherwise is counting something selectively.
The difference appears at the second person. Our price is per workspace, not per named user: the shift supervisor watching the chart on the wall, the engineer who set it up and the quality manager who reviews it on Monday are one subscription, not three. Whether that matters depends entirely on how many people need to see the same chart — which is a question about how you work, not about which vendor is better.
The comparison that actually decides it
Price is the wrong axis, and it is worth saying so on the page that ranks for price.
Minitab is a statistics package: you export the readings, run the study, read the result, write it up. It is very good at that, and better at it than we are — we say so at length elsewhere.
A live control chart is a different job: nobody opens it, it updates as the line runs, and it raises a signal within minutes of the process moving. A study on a laptop cannot do that at any price, and a live chart cannot design an experiment at any price.
So the question that settles it is not "which costs less". It is how long after a process shifts do you find out? If the honest answer is "when someone next runs the study", buy the statistics package and stop reading. If it needs to be "within the shift", the seat-based licence is not the thing standing in your way — the tool's shape is.
Many plants need both. The mistake is buying the first and assuming it covers the second.
Before you decide anything
Do not take either vendor's word for the arithmetic. The free tools here run the same engine the product runs, with no signup and nothing stored. Paste the readings from a study you have already run in Minitab into the Cp/Cpk calculator or the Gage R&R calculator and check that the numbers agree. If they do, the remaining question is only the one above. If they do not, that is worth understanding before any purchase order is raised.
Minitab is a registered trademark of Minitab, LLC. We are not affiliated with Minitab, and the prices above are theirs, quoted as published on the date given.