It would be really useful to have a comparison page on the Wolfram site that lists Wolfram|One and Mathematica, the same way that I can compare a macBook Pro and an iMac on the Apple website.

Other than the fact that Wolfram|One is subscription only, I can see no difference in the products.

I notice that Stephen Wolfram seems to use Wolfram Desktop a lot in his presentations when he is talking about Mathematica, so as far as desktop functionality is concerned, there cannot be any difference.

When Wolfram|One was first released, I thought that it was a simple rebranding of Mathematica. After all, Mathematica has expanded well beyond its original purpose -- "A system for Doing Mathematics by Computer", as the subtitle of the original Mathematica book states. Whether or not it would make marketing sense to unify the products under the new name is problematic. As a long-time user since version 1, I would have no problem with the renaming, but almost 30 years of mostly free publicity is hard to give up.

What I find odd is that various Wolfram Research offerings do not play well together. For example, my premier service plus plan for Mathematica does not give me access to the Wolfram Programming Lab or the Wolfram Development platform, even though I already have all the functionality. (Some of the UI features of the Programming lab are useful when trying to teach newbies, for example.)

I prefer to 'own' the software, rather than renting it, and the latter seems to be the only option for Wolfram|One. For a professional user, one is paying a yearly fee of about half the outright purchase price for Mathematica, so if one is using the program more than two or three years, it is less expensive to buy Mathematica and purchase Premier Service every year than to continue with an annual fee. I see that there is an annual subscription for Mathematica, which is almost exactly the same price as the subscription for Wolfram|One.

I did a quick check of the pricing for the home use/personal use, and the benefits are exactly the same. The subscription price is exactly the same as well. So, you can pay a bit more to buy Mathematica initially, and have a lower annual cost for each subsequent year, or rent the software. I hadn't looked at this pricing before because I have an Industry license, and there are more options with this.

So, the real question remains: what is special about Wolfram|One, compared to Mathematica? If you use the subscription model for Mathematica, I can see no difference between the two. The advantage of Mathematica for me is that the yearly cost of ownership is substantially less with the outright purchase of Mathematica plus Premier Service Plus, and would be for a new user as well.

I did talk about this matter with my account manager when Wolfram|One was released, and he could not find any difference in the products, other than the licensing model. However, he was probably looking only at the Industry license (which I have), and not at the other user categories.

To conclude, as far as I can tell, the only difference between Wolfram|One and Mathematica, other than the name, is the fact that Wolfram|One is available only as an annual subscription, while Mathematica can also be purchased outright. With the current pricing schemes, the only relevant consequence of this is that the cost of 'ownership' is significantly less for Mathematica (purchase plus Premier Service Plus) if the program is kept up-to-date for more than two years. (This break-even point may vary a bit by user-type, but it is close enough.)

The one remaining nagging detail that the marketing pages do not cover is the explicit statement that all the features and functionality of the Wolfram Language are equally supported. This is of concern because other Wolfram Research products: Data Science Platform, Finance Platform, and System Modeler differentiate themselves by offering additional functionality not provided with Mathematica, and presumedly, Wolfram|One. So, if there really is extra functionality in Wolfram|One that is not made explicit on the marketing pages, it would be useful to know that.

I think that this is the thrust of this thread.

Hi Murray

Mathematica is our legacy desktop product, best used in combination with Mathematica Online. Premier Service Plus can be added to Mathematica and provides support + home-use + Mathematica Online. This would easily enable deployments, sharing, and publishing from desktop to cloud.

Wolfram|One is our newest product, and is intended to provide an entry point to the Wolfram Language, particularly for commercial users. It is a hybrid product, in that it offers a desktop and cloud interface under one license. Feature wise, Mathematica and Wolfram|One are very similar right now. We are planning for Wolfram|One to become our base product for non-Mathematica audiences, and build upon it for specific use cases. (Data Science, Publishing, etc.)

The Wolfram Cloud is not a product, you cannot purchase it. Wolfram Cloud is the infrastructure that enables all of our Cloud products and services. Data Drop is a service that utilizes the Wolfram Cloud for data accumulation. It is not a product, it is a service that can be used in combination with any Cloud connected product.

Finally, the Wolfram Development Platform was our first product utilizing the Wolfram Cloud. It is primarily a cloud product, accessed via the web. The licensing (and free entry points) is designed for software/app development and experimentation.

I hope this was helpful. Our Sales team could talk through your individual goals and needs to ensure you find the right path. Please email sales@wolfram.com or contact them through this form - http://www.wolfram.com/company/contact/sales/

Thank you for your interest! Clayton Voyles Wolfram Research

Yes, I know what "etc" is an abbreviation for!

Just to get at long last what will be -- I hope! -- a definitive, clear, and complete answer....

The only differences between Mathematica with Premier Plus Service, on the one hand, and Wolfram|One, on the other hand are with respect to licensing terms and limits (commercial vs. non-commercial use, number of kernels, evaluation time and space, storage, credits, etc.)?

If that's so, why on earth can't anybody simply say that?? Why make things so obscure and unclear??

Note that you have a genuine marketing problem if WRI cannot say simply, clearly, and unambiguously what differentiates its cloud-related products! Right not it does not.

What do you mean by "hobbyist" license? Is this that Wolfram Home or the like? Just another dubious product with unknown features..

Do you think, it would cover my 7 points from above (maybe without point 7: debugger)? And I could live without my point 6: Replication local <-> (Wolfram-) cloud, since my Microsoft OneDrive is able to do that without any problems.

BTW: For some tens of years I have never seen an IDE without a debugger. The Wolfram-packages are the first to miss that standard feature. (Let aside that Eclipse plug-in. I know Eclipse and worked a lot with it). When I bought WPL I did not even think on the possibility that it does not have a debugger. It's really funny, or sad. Now I have to scatter my code with nonsense conditional Echo- and Print-statements. Just like 40 years ago at Algol or Fortran times.

Until now I was not aware of the important role of $UserBaseDirectory/Applications and did not use it. I will try that and see if my Programming Lab can work with local files there.

It's a pity (or a desaster): The Programming Lab desktop cannot save anything to any local Folder. Probably I would have to adapt your style to Wolfram cloud folders.

Sorry for my possibly outdated American idiom.

Mathematica's design and goals are different from other languages, such as c, COBOL. FORTRAN, or even MatLab. Stephen has talked about this extensively and more knowledgeably than I can.

Tools for 'professional' development are big added, and Workbench seems to the the best solution for large scale development. There is some integration with GitHub for collaboration, but I have not used it. The Unit testing tools are useable.

In the past, I wrote significant software in c and its successors. I used Mathematica (since 1989, at least) to do the R&D and some prototyping, but the production code was all in c. Now, I am using Mathematica for exploration and what would be called experimental mathematics, and for this work, Mathematica is the best.

The point of my post was to say that if you look at Wolfram Language as another language like c, you will likely miss the point of Wolfram Language's design and goals. It took me a while to make the transition. There are tools in Xcode (for example) that I wish I had in Mathematica or Workbench, but on balance, I can get more done with less code with Wolfram Language and Mathematica than any other language I have used over the past 40+ years.

Somebody (I think Jay Freeman) liked my post. I want to add my current state to that many years old discussion.

Meanwhile I dropped Programming Lab and switched to Wolfram|One (V13.0.1, 64bit, $263/year, Windows 10/11). This is a true desktop version with local files (which I synchronize automatically with my Microsoft OneDrive cloud). It solves almost all my former concerns, let aside debugging, which is still unusable (Debugger within Evaluation menu).

What I like the most with Wolfram is symbolic computation and notebooks. The latter are really great for doing programming and documentation at the same place.

Hi Murray

Mathematica with PS+ provides the same base capabilities as Wolfram|One. Desktop client, web access, and cloud resources. Obviously there are licensing differences, though, depending on the edition/plan. That dictates commercial vs. non-commercial usage, cloud storage, cloud credits, etc.