No. Octave claims to support Matlab syntax, and they largely do, but not completely. And they most certainly don't provide all the packages Matlab has, which is where a lot of the use is.
Octave is also unstable, and I doubt any company needing heavy use of a tool like this in production would trust Octave to not puke. It's just simply cheaper to use the polished and vastly more feature rich tool. Download Octave, go find some decently complex matlab code on github, and try to run it. Do that a bit and see how much works as it should.
Octave lists places they see themselves as different, some of which is core pieces that don't work the same. So if you want to replace some engineering tasks with Octave, it's going to be a mess, in the same way OpenOffice is close to MS Office, until the day you send a proposal with a deadline and it pukes because the other end used MS Word instead of an almost clone.
I've used Octave - it's decent. If you cannot afford Matlab, or your school doesn't have it, or you want to learn "matlab" to get marketable skills, then one can learn on Octave. Most serious engineering will not be done on Octave though.
Octave is also unstable, and I doubt any company needing heavy use of a tool like this in production would trust Octave to not puke. It's just simply cheaper to use the polished and vastly more feature rich tool. Download Octave, go find some decently complex matlab code on github, and try to run it. Do that a bit and see how much works as it should.
Octave lists places they see themselves as different, some of which is core pieces that don't work the same. So if you want to replace some engineering tasks with Octave, it's going to be a mess, in the same way OpenOffice is close to MS Office, until the day you send a proposal with a deadline and it pukes because the other end used MS Word instead of an almost clone.
I've used Octave - it's decent. If you cannot afford Matlab, or your school doesn't have it, or you want to learn "matlab" to get marketable skills, then one can learn on Octave. Most serious engineering will not be done on Octave though.
[1] https://wiki.octave.org/Differences_between_Octave_and_Matla...