Both are proprietary trapware.

Mathematica is only trapware because it's so much better than anything else available

Have you tried Sage Math[1]? They also have online version called CoCalc[2]. And it's built with Python, which is a way better scripting language.

[1] http://www.sagemath.org/

[2] https://cocalc.com/

Sage is great, but it's no Mathematica.

This is what I always answer whenever somebody asks me why I stick to Mathematica rather than using some convoluted collection of SAGE/R/NumPy/SymPy.

MapleSoft Maple was on par with Mathematica, when I worked with both (ca 2010). Not sure about current state of affairs. Maple's embedded programming language is also quite a bit nicer.

I remember that back when I was in University there was a set of simultaneous ordinary differential equations that MAPLE was able to solve that Mathematica choked on.

I remember reporting this to my tutor. He looked at me with a steely gaze and said “That is a very serious allegation to make, young man. Are you willing stand by it?”

Maple's PDE solving abilities always made me want to yell "witchcraft!".

P.S. I actually remembered one area where Maple is still absolutely superior, that is plotting. It doesn't require to explicitly set argument range, it tries to find features of the function and adjusts the range to include them. AFAIK, Mathematica still doesn't do this.

They used to say that about flash too.

They were correct, too.

Then along came HTML 5.