What a Stata license buys
Stata is licensed per seat and per edition. A single-user academic license runs about 175 to 275 USD a year as of 2026, business licenses start around 925 USD, and the larger multi-core editions cost more. What the license buys, for most epidemiologists, is a fixed toolkit: rates, ratios, matched designs, survival, trends.
That toolkit, free in the browser
- Log-binomial regression for risk ratios, when odds ratios would overstate a common outcome
- Conditional logistic regression for matched case-control studies
- Poisson regression for counts and rates, Cox proportional hazards for time-to-event
- Kaplan-Meier curves with the log-rank test, life tables, and cumulative incidence
- Joinpoint trend analysis with AAPC for surveillance data
- ROC curves, diagnostic accuracy, prevalence estimation, and the standard comparison tests
Data goes in as CSV, Excel, or a paste from any spreadsheet. Every result shows its formula and a citation for your methods section.
The synthesis layer, with the review around it
Meta-analysis and network meta-analysis are built-in tools validated against R's metafor and netmeta, with forest and funnel plots, subgroup analysis, meta-regression, and league tables. Around them sits the review workflow Stata does not have: screening, risk of bias, GRADE, and PRISMA.
An honest note
Stata earns its keep in panel-data econometrics, complex survey designs, and the do-file audit trail some fields expect. Covexe does not replace any of that. For meta-analyses it offers downloadable R replication scripts instead, so your results can be reproduced outside the browser. If your work is epidemiological analysis and evidence synthesis, you can do it here without the license.