In 1984, Cleve Moler, Steve Bangert, and Jack Little rewrote the MATLAB codebase in C and founded The MathWorks company to market the software and continue its development. MATLAB is used extensively in education, in particular by engineering undergraduate students, and often serves as their first exposure to scripted or API-based programming. Other areas in which MATLAB remains popular are optimal control design, image processing, and rapid prototyping of linear algebra algorithms.

MathWorks typically provides twice-yearly (a and b version) updates to the software; an example would be R2020a (also known as version 9.8). Although official pricing information is only available by requesting a quote from the MathWorks, the cost of MATLAB is often prohibitive for individual researchers or scientists in industry whose company does not have a group license. Universities have access to academic pricing plans and frequently provide MATLAB in campus computer labs as part of their service.

For some uses, the largely-compatible open-source GNU Octave may be a viable alternative to MATLAB, but it does not include all of the functionality provided by many of the MATLAB toolboxes.