Toolboxes and Add-On Products
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This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official documentation before being relied on in production. The reference material consulted while preparing these pages is listed in the section bibliography. |
Written against MATLAB R2026b; the product names, pages and documentation links in this page were opened on 2026-10-22. This is the only page of the section about the add-on products. The rest of the section covers base MATLAB, the language and the environment that every installation has, so that everything works without any product beyond MATLAB. Nothing below documents a product beyond its name, one line and its official links: for anything else, use the product’s own documentation.
What an add-on product is
MATLAB is sold as the base product plus a large family of separately licensed products. Most of them are called toolboxes (Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, Signal Processing Toolbox); a few have other names (Simulink, Stateflow, Simscape, MATLAB Compiler, MATLAB Coder). They install on top of MATLAB, add functions, classes, apps and Simulink blocks, and need a licence per product. Base MATLAB neither contains them nor lists them as errors: a call to a function that belongs to a product you do not have fails with an "undefined function" error, or with a licence-checkout error when the product is installed but not licensed.
Why the section does not document them: a toolbox is a product with its own documentation, versioning and licence, and MathWorks maintains that documentation. Teaching the language does not need it. Where an example in this section could be written more easily with a toolbox function, the page uses the base function and says so in prose.
The word "toolbox" has two meanings
| Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|
A MathWorks add-on product |
Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, Deep Learning Toolbox and so on. This is what this page lists. The word has not changed. |
A shareable bundle of user code (a |
Called a toolbox file before R2026b. Since R2026b the documentation calls such files package files, and the bundles packages. See the package and toolbox table and Packages and the MATLAB Package Manager. |
So "install a toolbox" can mean two different things. Installing the product is done with the installer or the Add-On Explorer; installing a package of shared code is done with mpminstall or from File Exchange.
Listing what is installed
ver % MATLAB, Simulink and every installed product, with versions
v = ver("matlab"); % version information for one product
addons = matlab.addons.installedAddons % a table of installed add-onsver prints the release and the installed products. matlab.addons.installedAddons returns a table with one row for each installed add-on; its reference page is the place to check the columns your release returns. These commands were not run here: R2026b is not installed on the machine that produced these pages, and Octave 11.3.0 has no matlab.addons namespace.
Getting products and packages
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The installer and the Add-On Explorer. Products are installed with the MathWorks installer; the Add-On Explorer, opened from the desktop, installs add-ons, support packages and packages from File Exchange and other sources. It is described in Add-Ons.
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mpminstall. Installs a MATLAB Package Manager package from a folder or from a repository. Since R2026b File Exchange is a default package repository. Packages are shared user code, not MathWorks products. -
File Exchange. The community repository at mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange. Its contents are contributed by users and are not checked by MathWorks; read the licence and the code before using it.
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MATLAB Online. MATLAB Online runs MATLAB in a browser with a set of products available, depending on the licence.
Source: MATLAB documentation: Add-Ons
Popular products
The table below is the "popular products" list. The selection criterion is stated plainly: the products that are featured on MathWorks' products page and that appear most often among the tags of questions on MATLAB Answers. No download or usage figures are given, and none were measured; "popular" is an editorial grouping, not a ranking. The full list is on the products page, and it is longer than this one.
Each row has the product name, a one-line description written for this page, the official product page (https://www.mathworks.com/products/<name>.html) and the documentation hub (https://www.mathworks.com/help/<short>/). Product page and documentation names do not always match (the System Identification Toolbox page is sysid and its documentation ident), so the links were each opened, not derived.
Simulation
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Simulink |
Block-diagram environment for modelling, simulating and analysing dynamic systems |
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Stateflow |
State machines and flow charts for modelling reactive logic, used inside Simulink models |
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Simscape |
Physical modelling of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic and thermal systems in Simulink |
Maths, statistics and optimisation
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox |
Descriptive statistics, probability distributions, hypothesis tests, regression and classical machine learning |
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Optimization Toolbox |
Linear, quadratic, nonlinear, integer and multiobjective optimisation solvers |
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Global Optimization Toolbox |
Solvers for problems with several local minima, such as genetic algorithms and particle swarm |
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Symbolic Math Toolbox |
Symbolic computation: exact algebra, calculus and equation solving |
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Curve Fitting Toolbox |
Fitting curves and surfaces to data, with an interactive app |
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Partial Differential Equation Toolbox |
Solving partial differential equations by the finite element method |
AI and data science
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Deep Learning Toolbox |
Designing, training and analysing neural networks |
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Reinforcement Learning Toolbox |
Training agents by reinforcement learning |
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Text Analytics Toolbox |
Preparing and modelling text data |
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Predictive Maintenance Toolbox |
Condition monitoring and remaining-useful-life estimation |
Signal, image and vision
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Signal Processing Toolbox |
Analysing, filtering and transforming signals |
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DSP System Toolbox |
Designing and simulating streaming digital signal processing systems |
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Image Processing Toolbox |
Image analysis, segmentation, enhancement and geometric transforms |
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Computer Vision Toolbox |
Object detection, tracking, camera calibration and 3-D vision |
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Audio Toolbox |
Audio analysis, feature extraction and real-time audio processing |
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Wavelet Toolbox |
Wavelet analysis of signals and images |
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Point Cloud Toolbox |
Processing point cloud data; the product page is still served at the address of the former Lidar Toolbox (see below) |
Control and robotics
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Control System Toolbox |
Designing and analysing control systems |
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System Identification Toolbox |
Building dynamic models from measured input and output data |
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Robotics System Toolbox |
Designing, simulating and testing robot applications |
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Automated Driving Toolbox |
Designing and testing driving and driver-assistance systems |
Communications and RF
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Communications Toolbox |
Designing and simulating physical-layer communications systems |
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Antenna Toolbox |
Designing, analysing and visualising antennas |
Finance
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Financial Toolbox |
Financial data analysis, portfolio optimisation and risk |
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Econometrics Toolbox |
Modelling and analysing economic and financial time series |
Parallel computing and deployment
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Parallel Computing Toolbox |
Running computations on multicore processors, GPUs and clusters |
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MATLAB Compiler |
Packaging MATLAB programs as standalone applications and web apps |
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MATLAB Compiler SDK |
Packaging MATLAB functions as libraries and components for other languages |
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MATLAB Coder |
Generating C and C++ code from MATLAB code |
Data access and hardware
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Database Toolbox |
Exchanging data with relational and NoSQL databases |
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Mapping Toolbox |
Analysing and displaying geographic data |
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Instrument Control Toolbox |
Communicating with instruments such as oscilloscopes and function generators |
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Data Acquisition Toolbox |
Acquiring and generating data with data acquisition hardware |
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Industrial Communication Toolbox |
Reading and writing industrial data over OPC and similar protocols |
Other
| Product | One-line description | Product page | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
Bioinformatics Toolbox |
Reading, analysing and visualising genomic and proteomic data |
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MATLAB Test |
Authoring, managing and measuring tests, and requirements-based test coverage |
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MATLAB Copilot |
An AI assistant for MATLAB, sold separately from base MATLAB |
Renames and new products
Some names in older material have changed or may mislead.
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OPC Toolbox is now the Industrial Communication Toolbox. The rename is reported as having happened in R2022a; this was not re-checked against the release notes. The product page is served at https://www.mathworks.com/products/industrial-communication.html and also at the older address https://www.mathworks.com/products/opc.html.
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Lidar Toolbox is now served as Point Cloud Toolbox. The page https://www.mathworks.com/products/lidar.html, whose address still says lidar, is titled "Point Cloud Toolbox", and so is the documentation at https://www.mathworks.com/help/lidar/. Whether this is a rename of the product or a change in the product line is not stated on the pages; if a release note matters to you, check it.
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New products. The page R2026b - Updates to the MATLAB and Simulink product families lists the Visual Inspection Toolbox (product page, documentation) and the Simulink Variant Manager (product page, documentation) among the additions. They are mentioned here for completeness and are not in the table.
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MATLAB Copilot (R2025a) is an assistant sold separately; it is a product, not a language feature.
Free alternatives
GNU Octave has its own package system, separate from MATLAB’s add-ons: the pkg command and the packages published at packages.octave.org (Octave Forge). They cover some of the same ground as the toolboxes (signal processing, statistics, image processing, optimisation) with different function names and behaviour. This is third-party software, unrelated to MathWorks; see GNU Octave Compatibility. Within MATLAB, File Exchange and the MATLAB Package Manager give access to community code in a different way.
Pitfalls
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Assuming a function is in base MATLAB. The documentation hub that holds the function’s reference page names the product it belongs to, and
which -all nameshows the file that MATLAB would run. If the name is not found, you may not have the product. -
Reading examples from the web that use a toolbox without saying so. The examples in this section need only base MATLAB.
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Treating File Exchange as a MathWorks product. It is user-contributed.
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Mixing the two senses of "toolbox" (see above).
Where older books differ
The older books predate most of the current product line, so any product list in them is out of date, and their names for products have changed (see the renames above). The mathematics volume mentions symbolic mathematics as if it came from Maple, which has not been true since R2008b; today symbolic computation is the Symbolic Math Toolbox, a separate product, and is outside this section.