>>7620946In my experience...
Mathematica/Matlab are the most popular in academia, big industry.
Octave/R/Gnuplot seem to be most popular with individuals due to FLOSS licensing.
https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/https://www.r-project.org/http://www.gnuplot.info/OriginLab's Origin Pro is popular and liked in the physics community. It has a vast number of features. I've never seen a plot that it didn't have a built-in for. It feels similar to Excel, so this may be what you're looking for.
http://www.originlab.com/I've also heard good things about DPlot.
http://www.dplot.com/A few friends in the biotech world like SAS JMP. They also use Bioperl and PDL, both FLOSS.
http://www.jmp.com/http://www.bioperl.org/http://pdl.perl.org/If you need image manipulation, GraphicsMagick has bindings in a lot of scripting languages .
http://www.graphicsmagick.org/Business, Finance, Journalists just use Excel.
Also check out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_plotting_software 
