Matlab is much faster. For a sense of scale, a relatively simple image processing script ran 125 times faster in Matlab than Octave. This is, most likely, because Matlab has a better code optimizer.
I don't see a compelling reason to use Octave unless you're trying to avoid paying for a Matlab license. If you're going to switch tools, why not switch to NumPy/SciPy and get the advantage of using a full-featured programming language?
I don't see a compelling reason to use Octave unless you're trying to avoid paying for a Matlab license. If you're going to switch tools, why not switch to NumPy/SciPy and get the advantage of using a full-featured programming language?