What Prism costs, and what most people use it for
GraphPad Prism is sold by subscription: about 260 USD per seat per year at academic rates and about 520 USD for commercial use as of 2026, with student pricing lower. Most researchers buy it for two things: clean publication figures and the standard biomedical tests. Both are covered here, free.
Publication figures in the browser
Figure Studio has more than 40 figure recipes, each with sample data and a downloadable data template: bar and box plots, survival curves, ROC curves, forest plots, Bland-Altman agreement plots with bias and 95% limits, heatmaps, and effect-modification plots. Each recipe renders from your pasted data and downloads as an image, with SVG output that stays sharp at any journal column width. When no recipe fits, an AI builder makes a custom figure from a description, with an editor for titles, axes, legends, fonts, and palettes.
The tests behind the figures
- t-tests (independent Welch, paired, one-sample) and one-way ANOVA with Tukey HSD
- Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon signed-rank, and Kruskal-Wallis for non-normal data
- Chi-square, Fisher's exact, and McNemar
- Correlation and seven regression models, including Cox proportional hazards
- Kaplan-Meier survival with the log-rank test, ROC with AUC
Every result reports its formula with a citation, and the engines are cross-checked against R.
An honest note
Nonlinear curve fitting is Prism's home ground: dose-response curves, EC50s, enzyme kinetics. Covexe does not fit custom nonlinear models, and a pharmacology lab living in those curves should keep Prism. For group comparisons, survival, diagnostics, and evidence-synthesis figures, the browser covers it, free.