Hi, I am looking to purchase Matlab license and would like some advice on which will be a better option?

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Kabster on 29 Oct 2021
Answered: Steven Lord on 29 Oct 2021
I am looking to get the Matlab for AI and deep learning purposes and would love to have a license which enables installation and multiple account for various users for a lab. I am actually kind of confused as to what are the various licenses available and will there be additional quotes for the various toolboxes? Is it possible to get all the toolboxes as well?

Answers (3)

Sambit Supriya Dash
Sambit Supriya Dash on 29 Oct 2021
If you have any resource person who is pursuing any degrees from any universities, you can ask for their credentials for the maximum benifits you could get.
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Kabster on 29 Oct 2021
I am actually looking to purchase Matlab and the relevant toolboxes for my lab members to use, sadly I do not have anyone within the capacity of being an undergrad/student.

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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 29 Oct 2021
There are a few different kinds of licenses that might apply.
First, if I understand your posts correctly, you will need "Standard" licenses, which are also sometimes called Professional licenses or Commercial licenses. The three names refer to exactly the same thing: full-priced full-capability licenses.
Within Standard licenses, there are several different ways of managing licenses
Individual licenses can be installed on individual local hosts, each one for the use of one particular user. No license server is used, and the licenses can if necessary be used without internet. Each user has their own license and use by one user does not affect use by any other user.
When an organization purchases several individual licenses, they can move them around between different users, but only about 4 times per year.
These are the kinds of licenses that you see the prices for in the online store.
There are also two major kinds of Network licenses, requiring license server access.
Floating licenses are provisioned by maximum simultaneous access, and can be used by anyone who can authenticate to the license server, without having to be registered in advance. Access is first-come first-served. If you were to provision, for example, 4 MATLAB licenses and two Deep Learning licenses, then the first 4 users would grab the licenses and any two of them would be able to use the Deep Learning toolbox in that scenario, and a hypothetical 5th simultaneous person would be denied access. Until, that is, someone exited matlab, at which point any licenses they were using would become available to someone else. First use of a toolbox in a session grabs the toolbox for the entire rest of the session until the user exists matlab.
Floating licenses are nice for handling large numbers of users because you do not need to configure them individually into the matlab license files. However, they are a pain if you do not purchase more licenses than your peak usage needs, because you end up having to chase users to get them to quit matlab to free up licenses. And if you want to establish priority use, such as needing to be sure that your boss will have access in order to run a demo for a VP or customer, then floating license cannot give you that control. These are the most expensive kinds of licenses.
There are also Group licenses. Group licenses require that each person be configured into access controls ahead of time. You again purchase against maximum capacity, but you have finer grained control. For example you might subdivide to reserve one licence between your boss and the sales director, so that one of the two can be sure of being able to demo at any time. You can make individual allotments but also share a pool of toolbox licenses between a group (with the same disadvantage that you might end up chasing people to quit matlab if you underestimate peak use.)
Pools of licenses can constrain your costs, and it is often tempting when there are limited budgets to say that "oh, it's no real problem to just ask people to quit matlab if someone else needs the license." In practice, it can cost more than you expect. Someone is out for a few days but might be in the middle of editing or running a long computation or might not have saved results of a long computation. Someone is in meetings all day. Someone is at a different location... And in the meantime, the person who is waiting for a licence to be available might not be able to proceed with their work.
If there is rivalry between people or groups, then it is not a good idea for them to be sharing a limited license resource...

Steven Lord
Steven Lord on 29 Oct 2021
Because there are many different types of licenses as Walter Roberson described, I recommend contacting the MathWorks Sales department. You can describe your lab's configuration and your organization's needs to the sales staff member and they can help you determine the best license for that configuration and set of needs. They can also recommend what toolboxes may be of use for the work that your staff members will perform.

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