Frontline’s Optimization and Simulation Solvers

Better Decisions Through Advanced Analytics Made Easy

Frontline Systems’ Solver products have brought more Excel users into the realm of advanced analytics than any other products on the market. We’ve done that by focusing on your needs and advancing the power, ease of use, capacity, and range of problems that our Solvers can handle to get you the best answers and insights with the least effort. Perhaps that is why over 5,000 leading businesses and universities around the world have chosen Frontline Solvers as the tool of choice for their business.

New: Learn about XLMiner, our new Data Mining add-in for Excel for Windows.

We Have the Right Tools to Meet Your Needs

Whether you are looking to better allocate scarce resources with optimization, analyze risk with Monte Carlo simulation, or make the best decisions under uncertainty using the most advanced techniques simply not available elsewhere, inside or outside of Excel, our easy to use Excel solvers can meet your needs. They are designed to let you start quickly, even for free, with what you need today, and then easily upgrade to even more powerful solutions tomorrow, all without having to change your model, any VBA code you are using, or even learn a new interface.

Learn More About Our Products

Click on any of the boxes below to learn more about either a problem type (e.g. Conventional Optimization, etc.) or a particular product (Risk Solver Platform, etc.)



Compare our Solvers for Excel

Below are several comparison charts which may be helpful. We are of course always happy to assist with any questions to help make sure you are finding the right product for your unique needs.

You may also be interested in:

• learning more about XLMiner, our new Data Mining add-in for Excel for Windows
• learning more about our SDK products for Developers
• background information on our technology

Our Platform Products: The Ultimate in Power with Unlimited Expansion

Premium Solver Platform

Our Best Platform for Conventional Optimization

Easily the most popular Excel optimizer ever offered, Premium Solver Platform is designed to handle every type and size of conventional optimization problem (without uncertainty). Unlike much other optimization software, it maximally exploits the multiple cores in your modern PC. With four times the capacity of Premium Solver Pro built in, you can solve nonlinear models 10 times larger than the Excel Solver, and linear models 40 times larger!

But that’s only the beginning – with optional Solver Engines that “plug in” to Premium Solver Platform, you can scale up your models to the largest sizes available with any software, anywhere – even millions of decision variables. There are 8 plug-in Solver Engines to choose from, and you pay for them only if and when you need them. Premium Solver Platform is 100% upward compatible from the Excel Solver and Premium Solver Pro, and it’s 100% upward compatible to Risk Solver Platform, which handles optimization models with uncertainty. No wonder it’s been the best-selling Excel optimizer for many years!

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Risk Solver Platform

Ultimate Simulation, Conventional and Stochastic Optimization Power in Excel

Risk Solver Platform is our “super-product” – other vendors of simulation software are light-years behind its power for optimization, and other vendors of optimization software aren’t even close to matching its power for simulation and stochastic optimization. It has all the features and capacity of Premium Solver Platform, all the features and capacity of Risk Solver Pro, and many new capabilities for robust optimization, decision analysis, and more that aren’t available in either product.

Risk Solver Platform maximally exploits the multiple cores in your modern PC for both optimization and simulation, and it can exploit HPC compute clusters running Microsoft’s latest software. Your Excel models and VBA macros are 100% upward compatible from the Excel Solver, Premium Solver Platform, and Risk Solver Pro. And it accepts all the same plug-in, large-scale Solver Engines as Premium Solver Platform – using them in new ways for stochastic optimization – giving you unlimited expansion potential.

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Solver SDK Platform

Ultimate Simulation, Conventional and Stochastic Optimization Power Outside Excel

What if you want to build larger optimization or simulation models in a custom application? What if you want to deploy your (largest) Excel-based optimization and simulation models on remote desktops, an Intranet or Web server, or in the cloud? You can do all of these things with Solver SDK Platform.

Its rich object-oriented API closely matches the object-oriented APIs of our Excel-based products, and it’s 100% upward compatible from Solver SDK Pro, across all the supported languages (C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, VB.NET, Java, and MATLAB) – just re-link your application and go! It goes further to exploit multi-core processors and even compute clusters, without special programming effort on your part. It accepts all the same plug-in, large-scale Solver Engines as Premium Solver Platform and Risk Solver Platform. But most remarkable is its ability to load Excel workbooks containing optimization and simulation models, created in Premium Solver Platform or Risk Solver Platform, and run them without needing Excel, on desktops, servers or in the cloud.

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Our Pro Products: Professional Apps, Proven Performance, at a Low Cost

Premium Solver Pro

Professional Optimization, 100% Compatible Upgrade

Premium Solver Pro (the successor to Premium Solver) isn’t free, but it’s far less expensive than most alternatives for optimization, inside and outside Excel. It’s 100% upward compatible from the Solver in Excel, for both models and VBA macros – just open your Excel workbook and run. You can solve nonlinear models 2.5 times larger than the Excel Solver, and linear models 10 times larger.

Premium Solver Pro gives you both Solver dialogs familiar from the Excel Solver, and a new Ribbon and Task Pane user interface, used in all of Frontline’s other Excel products. And in V11, it includes model analysis and Guided Mode – formerly available only in our more expensive Platform products: You won’t have to guess whether your model is linear or nonlinear, or which “solving method” to use – Premium Solver Pro will tell you automatically!

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Risk Solver Pro

Ultra-Fast, Professional Simulation, Decision Tree capabilities, Combinable with Premium Solver Pro for Simulation Optimization, 100% Compatible Upgrade

Risk Solver Pro is a powerful, faster alternative to products like @RISK and Crystal Ball, at a better price.  It includes all the features -- 50+ distributions, correlations, advanced sampling, fitting to historical data, charts and statistics, multiple simulations, and more -- that you'd expect in a professional-level product, but it runs Monte Carlo simulations 10x to 50x faster than competitors.

Risk Solver Pro also gives you the tools to create decision trees in Excel, and use them in simulations.  If you'd like to optimize your decisions, you'll find that Risk Solver Pro integrates tightly with Premium Solver Pro -- giving you a great combination of simulation/risk analysis, decision analysis, Excel Solver-compatible optimization, and simulation optimization power, for less than what others charge for only simulation and simulation optimization.

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Solver SDK Pro

Professional Optimization and Simulation for Developers

What if you want to build optimization or simulation into a custom application? Until now, your choices have been to write your own code or try using open source libraries with limited or no support, or spend up to ten thousand dollars for a powerful optimizer with its own specialized APIs (usually without any simulation capabilities). Solver SDK Pro, new in our V11 product line, offers a better alternative: A far less expensive way to get started with a supported, professional grade product, with unlimited expansion potential – all the way up to the largest Monte Carlo simulation models running on compute clusters, and LP/MIP optimization models will millions of decision variables.

Solver SDK Pro’s modern object-oriented API is fully compatible with its “big brother”, Solver SDK Platform, and with the VBA object models in our Excel products. And it has rich support, with scores of example programs, in C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, VB.NET, Java, and MATLAB.

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Our Data Mining Products: Powerful Tools with the Ease of Excel

XLMiner

Professional Data Mining add-in for Excel

XLMiner is a comprehensive data mining add-in for Excel helping you get insights from the data you have to help drive better decision making. Not only is it useful as a stand-alone data mining tool, helping you clean data and perform both analysis and prediction, but using it can also help you identify better inputs and relationships between data for use in your optimization and simulation models as well.

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Download a Free Trial Right Now

With a no-risk free trial, there is no reason to wait to try it for yourself.  Download your free trial of Risk Solver Platform today. This download includes all its subset products so you can try out any of them free for 15 days. You can use every feature of the software, solve real problems, examine the full User Guide and Help, and get expert technical support -- all without any obligation.

Just enter your name and email address, and optionally your company and phone, pick the closest "User Type," and click the Register for Download button.  You can download immediately after registering, or return later anytime -- just login with your email address.

User Type     Please Select Commercial User Consultant Corporate Developer Government/Military Professor Student VAR/ISV Developer Email Address First & Last Name Company or University Telephone We respect your privacy!  See our Privacy Policy Statement. Trial version passwords are sent to the above email address.

Ready to order, or just want to know more about prices, upgrades from previous versions, competitive upgrades, and annual support?  Click here for more information.