ACL2 vs Alloy Analyzer
ACL2
acl2.org
Alloy Analyzer
alloytools.orgSide by side
| Figure | ACL2 | Alloy Analyzer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Formal Verification Tools | 7.8 (#14) | 8.1 (#6) |
| Community support | The acl2, acl2-help, and acl2-books mailing lists serve general discussion, user help, and discussion of developments in ACL2 and its Community Books. | The project is maintained by volunteers, with Discourse as its main discussion venue and Stack Overflow as the venue for precise questions monitored by developers. |
| Purpose | ACL2 combines a Lisp-based programming language for formal models with a reasoning engine that can prove properties about those models. | Alloy is a language for describing evolving structures, and the Alloy Analyzer explores models by finding structures that satisfy constraints or counterexamples to properties. |
| Release | The installation page identifies version 8.7 as the latest stable release and says it does not include improvements or fixes made since March 2026. | The site lists Alloy 6.2.0 as the latest release, dated 2025-01-09. |
Plans
In their own words
Alloy Analyzer
Alloy Analyzer is a free model-checking tool for describing systems in the Alloy language and exploring the structures those descriptions permit. It searches for structures that satisfy constraints and for counterexamples to properties. Models can represent collections of structures that change over time, including security configurations and switching network topologies. The Analyzer presents results graphically, with appearance options that can be tailored to a domain. Alloy 6 adds mutable state, temporal logic, and temporal model checking; that checking requires NuSMV or nuXmv to be installed and available in PATH. The self-contained executable includes the Pardinus/Kodkod model finder, SAT solvers, the standard Alloy library, tutorial examples, and source code. The same JAR can be used as an API in other applications. Sterling adds a web-based visualizer with graph and table views, customizable and extendable with JavaScript. Alloy is self-hosted, supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and API use, and is maintained by volunteers.