Compared to old Axiom FriCAS has following advantages:

• a lot of bugs fixed
• ported to several Lisp implementations, in particular sbcl gives both better speed and stability than gcl which was the only choice in the past
• much faster Spad compiler
• improvements to integrator, limits and other core parts
• new subsystems
• regular source and binary releases
• new improved TeXmacs interface
• new notebook interface jFriCAS

Currently FriCAS routine for indefinite integration is best among free system and very competitive with commercial systems. In particular, integration in terms of special functions improved significantly, see FriCASSpecialIntegration

FriCAS contains implementation of Gruntz algorithm for computing limits. Consequently, several examples that caused problems in Axiom now work correctly.

FriCAS contains symbolic version of most special functions from Abramowitz and Stegun. FriCAS can compute derivatives, expand them into series and compute sume limits, etc. Numerical evaluation is available only for a subset.

Multivariate Ore algebras (in particular partial differential operators) with noncommutative Groebner bases.

Multivariate factorization: in characteristic 0 most polynomial domains have uniform implementation of factorization. FriCAS factorization routines can handle large examples (FactorizationExample).

Guessing package see GuessingFormulasForSequences.

Package for computations in quantum probability.

Package for computations in algebraic topology.

Package for computations with group presentations.

In FriCAS user level functions are typically compiled to machine code. Compilation to machine code and fact that FriCAS language is strongly typed leads to code which is much faster than interpreters used by several competing systems. See SpeedOfUserCode.

FriCAS Language and Library:

• at command line uses lexically scoped language with convenient constructs for iteration, functions (including closures)
• command line language is very similar to Spad language used to write FriCAS library (so library code is easier to understand)
• domains and categories provide an extensive library of generic algorithms that are easily extended to new domains
• generic programming methodology

Documentation:

• extensive documentation on the web
• active FriCAS Wiki
• excellent Help browser