Are software-recommendation questions on topic here?

Question

The question Is there an alternative to SIMION? was posted recently on the physics site. It sounds like something that may be better suited for this community, but I'm not sure to what extent software-recommendation questions (or other threads that can be argued to fall under the broader 'shopping' umbrella as defined in the early days of SO) are welcome or encouraged here; I looked on this meta but I couldn't find anything explicit, either because there isn't an existing thread with the right keywords or because I just mucked up the search.

Are questions like that one on-topic here?

Answer 1

Judging by some of the top-voted questions on this site, it seems that the community is open to software recommendation questions. I don’t recall any particular instances where such a question was not welcome, as long as:

1. It is not subject to closure under our standard criteria (e.g. too broad, unclear, etc...).

2. It involves a scientific field that heavily relies on computation and therefore has well established tools of the trade.

3. It is not a duplicate of a previous software recommendation request.

There is some overlap between such inquiries on this site and the software recommendation SE site (maybe even the Engineering SE too), but i think if you’re looking specifically for scientific modeling and simulation software, this site would probably be open to it.