@Nasser I have to explore alternatives to Mathematica for a project that involves simplification of formulas involving limits, derivatives and integrals. But on a rather basic level, no special functions involved. Do you have any recommendations? The project also involves parsing LaTeX or MathML and adding custom interpretation rules so that capabilities are a plus but not essential.

@Kuba do you want open source/free alternative or commercial is OK? For open source easiest one to try for this is sympy, since it comes with Python and easy to install and use if you know Python. sympy does all these things you mentioned. For parsing latex, Python seems to have couple of packages for this. I do not know about mathml, may be Python also has package for parsing it also.

Ofcourse the ability to simplify things is all relative. Mathematica is very good at this. You might find sympy less powerful in this aspect. Here is the docs on this for sympy docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorials/intro-tutorial/…

@Nasser thanks, yes I was going to start with sympy. Let's see how it performs.

Free is good but commercial are not ruled out.

@Kuba Python comes without sympy. But easy to install. I use pip install -U sympy but if you are using conda python I think the command is conda update sympy but you can google this in case it is changed since I used it. I do not use conda python any more. Sympy is good if you know Python already since you have access to all Python packages also.

@Nasser yes, I can manage it. I am more concerned about the best tool atm, not the easiest to use.

@Kuba are just doing "simplification of formulas" ? Or more? (Other than Latex parsing)? Will you be doing actual integration also or just simplification ? Mathematica is best in this front. I would say Maple is close second. Sympy and sagemath and maxima and giac/XCas are not going to be as good, but it all depends on what you have and how complicated the inputs are. For actual integration, Fricas is now the best open source alternative to commerical CAS.

But you can try sympy and find out if it meets your requirements. Since it is the easiest to start with.

@Nasser by simplification I also meant evaluation. E.g. I will need to verify that each step in getting towards a final derivative is correct.

@Kuba I think sympy should be able to do this. It has limit command and simplify command and so on. You just have to try and found out if it can handle your input or not. sympy tends to be slow but for small input size, this should not be much of a problem.

@Nasser thanks