The honest part

Why people look for an SPSS alternative

The usual reasons are not mysterious: SPSS is expensive and licensed per module, the output window is awkward to turn into a publishable table, and the parts most researchers need (a clean figure, a table that survives Word, an interpretation) are exactly the parts it leaves to you.

There is also free software — R, JASP and jamovi — and if it suits you, use it. R is the reference implementation of half of modern statistics and JASP and jamovi are excellent, genuinely free, and open source. Magic Stat is not a replacement for them, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

So where does Magic Stat actually fit? The gap it aims at is the one between the analysis and the manuscript: getting the result into the article without an hour of formatting.

What it does

From your spreadsheet to a publishable figure

No code, no command line. Load the data, choose the test, read the result.
Tables already in APA convention. Mean (SD), CLD as real superscripts, exact p-values alongside the <.001*** column — and the table pastes into Word or LibreOffice intact, with column widths sized to the content.
Publication-quality figures. Boxplots, correlation matrices and the rest, with legends placed outside the plot and scientific colour palettes.
Method coverage. From t-tests to SEM/PLS, mixed models, GAM, meta-analysis, psychometrics, time series and Bayesian analysis — one application, one visual language, no per-module licence.
A report you did not have to write. Every analysis goes into an automatic report with the interpretation, the assumptions and the effect size, exportable to .docx, .html or .md.
An AI assistant that runs the same engines. It executes the same code paths as the interface, so what it reports and what the interface shows agree by construction.
Your data stays on your machine. Nothing leaves the computer unless you ask it to.

Frequently asked

Questions worth answering honestly

Is it free?

No. There is a free 48-hour trial with no credit card, and after that the licence is US$990 per year. If you want free and open source, R, JASP and jamovi are excellent — Magic Stat competes on output and on the analysis-to-manuscript workflow, not on price.

Can it read the files I already have?

Yes — spreadsheets are the primary input, so you can keep the data where it is.

Do I have to send my data anywhere?

No. The analysis runs locally. The only automatic signal the app sends is an anonymous installation counter (no data, no names, no e-mail).

Does it replace SPSS entirely?

For most day-to-day work in a research group, probably yes. For a very specific procedure, check the method list first — if something is missing, that is useful to know and worth telling me about.

Which systems?

Windows, macOS and Linux.