I need a program to analyze Illumina transcriptome data. CLC has a free-trial but that only lasts for 14 days. I would like to have a program set up on my personal computer, so that I can analyze data not just in the lab, but also at other times.
It depends on what type of work you are going to perform. You can use MEGA4, for similar analysis part like MSA, ClustalW, Muscle, dendrogram prep etc. I will suggest you use the combination of software i.e. limited version of CLC and MEGA.
You don't say what it is you want to do. RNAseq? Assembly?
Nor what your personal computer is. Windows? Mac? Linux? If it's Windows you'll be limited to what you can do without installing another OS either dual-boot or in a Virtual Machine (e.g. VirtualBox).
There won't be anything that works like CLC, so be prepared to unlearn everything you know about CLC.
If you want a general purpose way of doing many things, then https://usegalaxy.org/ is a very good option as it only requires a web browser. If you want to become expert on a specific task or have complex requirements then the R/Bioconductor together with commandline skills route will be better.
Try InSilico DB (https://insilicodb.org) in combination with Gene-E, GenePattern, GenomeSpace.
It's free to access >200,000 manually curated public samples (microarray and RNASeq). There is also a service to store your private data and combine/compare it with public data.
GenomeSpace (www.genomespace.org) is a fantastic resource for integrating the use of multiple bioinformatics tools such as GALAXY, UCSC Genome Browser, Cytoscapte, GenePattern, Genomica, Integrative Genomics Vieweer [IGV], etc). It provides tools for formating the data as needed by each tool listed above. GenomeSpace provides the integrated workshop of more than 20 well-known bioinformatics tools.
http://www.genomespace.org
Article Integrative genomic analysis by interoperation of bioinforma...