Thanks to jeff.perkinson for putting this together from a longer white-paper draft that did not see the light of day. This is a nice JMP vs. Minitab comparison that focuses on the unique features of JMP. Feel free to use as appropriate with your customers.
Here’s a brief description and a partial list of unique features in JMP.
Both Minitab and JMP software offer many more capabilities than Excel when analyzing and graphing data. They differ in the requirements for file structure and interactivity of the graphs. Minitab uses an interface where the user selects which analysis or graph to run, the program displays a dialog box where the user selects which options to use, and then the program produces it’s textual and/or graphical results. For the most part, the reports and graphs produced are static.
While both JMP and Minitab launch analyses using a dialog box, Minitab’s menu structure and it’s launch dialogs force the user to make many analytic choices upfront, before the data can be visualized.
JMP, instead, offers simpler menu items (e.g., Distribution, Fit Y by X) and the launch dialogs in JMP have few options beyond the assignment of which column to analyze. The user is then presented a report window. However, the report output is not static. It is a dynamic window that provides contextually appropriate options for follow-on analyses.
Additionally, all graphs in JMP are interactive and dynamically linked with each other and the data table so that selecting points or bars in a graph, highlights those observations in every other graph.
In terms of analytic techniques, both packages offer the basic set of regression and modeling methods. They both have classical methods for designing and analyzing experiments. However, JMP adds a number of unique and distinguishing analysis options:
- Optimal Custom Design of Experiments
- Tabulate
- Data Filter
- Column Switcher
- Formula Editor
- Graph Builder
- Control Chart Builder
- Bubble Plots
- Partition
- Neural Networks
- cross validation
- simulation
- consumer research tools
- extensibility through scripting
- and more
