I think Any-Maze is really useful and pretty intuitive (though, like any of the multi-use systems, it can be a little labor intensive to set up a brand new assay on the software). It can be used for all your standard behaivoural assays (EPM/EZM, OFC, MWM, Barnes maze, poke hole maze, t-maze, y-maze, object recognition, I mean, really, the list goes on and on). But as far as behavioural assays you can run with these systems, I'm pretty sure they're nearly identical if not totally identical.

I'm not as familiar with the Ethovision but it supposedly has automatic behaviour recognition, that is it knows to code sniffing as sniffing and not as twitching, which theoretically could save you a bunch of time but, of course, you would really want to track along with the system several times and make sure that it scores things the same thing you would. Bottom line, I think it really depends on how you want to use it. Any-maze doesn't have as many of the automatic behaviour recognition options so, if you're not really interested in that feature, it might be a good option.

Any-Maze also comes with the statistical package which does all the basic descriptives stuff like means and STDEVs, etc (which I know Ethovision does) but also can run your inferential statistics (so t-tests, ANOVAs, and even post-hocs), I'm not aware of Ethovision having this benefit yet. And I've verified the Any-Maze stats, they're just as good and accurate as anything you would get from a stats package like SPSS, Prism, or JMP.

But if you don't mind having to run your own stats (I could be wrong about Ethovision not doing inferentials ) and you're more interested in the automatic behaviour coding function, that's probably your best bet.

Hope at least some of that helped!

I have used both, mainly for looking at performance in specific tasks (MWM, +-maze, etc.) rather than the natural behaviours described by Jordan above and have found no real functional difference between the packages (for my uses at least). I ran video recordings from MWM in Ethovision and again in ANY-maze and got the same results from both which is encouraging.

Overall, I found ANY-maze easier to use but one of the drawbacks is that I think it needs a yearly license to be bought with it (it will let you open files but not save/analyse when the license has expired) though this might be different now versus 3-4 years ago. Ethovision does have the advantage of being the standard for so long now but is more restricted as to what video camera you can use with it (it didn't like our webcams which worked fine in ANY-maze).