I think Octave is much more slower than Matlab. Especially, if you have many looping in the program. Matlab is faster because of the JIT (just in time) architecture.

I guess most of the guys down here has provided a basic comparison between to the 2 softwares. To add on to their answer…I would like to mention about Simulink which is exclusive to matlab only.Moreover in a lot of packages like control system package Matlab provides an easy way to calculate certain parameters from graph unlike in Octave where we have to write code to obtain the same. Matlab also provides a lot of support packages and toolboxes unlike Octave.

But you know what….Octave is free and thats its biggest advantage.

So now to answer your question….if you need a software to run some graphs and do maths without in depth functioning capabilities go for Octave else Matlab.

But my personal favorite will always be matlab.

How come no one is mentioning Python here? :)

Maybe just because the question is specifically about Matlab vs Octave?

I think, conclusively, simulink and toolkits and somehow symbolic computations are advantages, Matlab have over octave.

Have a look at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_between_Octave_and_MATLAB#:~:text=Both%20MATLAB%20and%20Octave%20have,control%20from%20the%20Octave%20prompt.

https://wiki.octave.org/Packages