Frequently asked questions

Helix is a Mac app to organize, analyze and visualize scientific data, from raw numbers to publication-ready graphs. It’s a free, open-source and private alternative to GraphPad Prism: each table holds its own analyses and graphs, which update as soon as the data change.

Yes. Helix is free and open source, under the GPL-3.0 license: no account, no subscription, no paid version. If it saves you time, you can buy me a coffee.

Any Mac with macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. There are two downloads: aarch64 for Apple Silicon (M1 and later) and x64 for Intel Macs. Not sure which one you have? Apple menu › About This Mac shows your chip.

No. R runs inside Helix through webR, so there is nothing else to install or configure.

Not for now: Helix is made for macOS. Never say never, though.

Helix’s two engines are web technologies: R runs through webR (R compiled to WebAssembly) and the graphs are drawn by Plotly, a JavaScript library. Tauri runs them in macOS’s own web engine, inside a small native shell written in Rust. Unlike Electron, it doesn’t ship a whole browser, so Helix stays light and fast, with real Mac menus and shortcuts.

Partly, and openly. Most of Helix, by size, is two open-source engines I didn’t write: webR, which brings R to the app, and Plotly, which draws the graphs. My job is everything around them: the tables, the guided assistants, the graph settings and the Mac app itself. I build it with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant, which spends an unreasonable amount of time auditing and optimizing the code, and running the tests that check every analysis against R. It never complains, never sleeps, and would refactor the whole app for breakfast if I let it! The whole history is public on GitHub.

Helix is signed and notarized by Apple, so macOS knows where it comes from and has checked it. Its code is public on GitHub, and each download is built by GitHub directly from that public code. Want to double-check? Feel free to drop the DMG on VirusTotal, which scans it with dozens of antivirus engines.

No. Helix works entirely on your Mac, without an account, a cloud or any telemetry. Its only connection is a daily check on GitHub for a newer version.

Yes. Analyses and graphs run entirely on your Mac. An internet connection is only used for the daily check for a newer version.

Yes: copy your values in Excel or Numbers and paste them into a Helix table. Copying from Helix to a spreadsheet works too.

Yes: Help › Sample Project opens a ready-made project with many kinds of tables, analyses and graphs to explore.

Descriptive statistics and outlier detection (ROUT); t tests (unpaired, Welch, paired, ratio), Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon; one-way and repeated-measures ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis and Friedman, with multiple comparisons (Tukey, Bonferroni, Dunn); two-way ANOVA and multiple t tests; Pearson and Spearman correlation; linear, nonlinear (dose-response, 4PL) and multiple regression; area under the curve; chi-square and Fisher’s exact test. Guided assistants help you pick the right one. This is a foundation, not a finished list: if a test you need is missing, say so in the Discussions.

That was priority number one. Rather than rewriting statistics from scratch, Helix relies on tools that have proven themselves and are accepted by the scientific community: every result is computed by R, the reference for statistics, running inside the app through webR. Choosing R was the first decision, and Helix was built around it. On top of that, an automated test suite checks every analysis and graph against R.

Export as PNG (up to 600 dpi), SVG or JPG, with a white or transparent background, or copy and paste the graph anywhere. You can set exact sizes, or resize a graph by dragging an axis.

A Helix project (.hlx) is a plain JSON file, documented in the open. Your data stay readable with or without Helix. That was essential from the start: your data should never be locked into an app, Helix included.

Helix checks once a day and tells you when a new version is out (Helix › Check for Updates…). Download it and replace the old app in your Applications folder; your projects are not affected. See what changed in the release notes.

Share your idea in the Discussions on GitHub. Feedback from people using Helix shapes what comes next.

Ask questions and share ideas in the Discussions. To report a bug, open an issue on GitHub.