The simulation and analysis framework ixpeobssim was specifically developed for the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). It produces realistic simulated observations, in the form of event lists in FITS format, that also contain a strict superset of the information included in the publicly released IXPE data products. The framework's core simulation capabilities are complemented by post-processing applications that support the spatial, spectral, and temporal models needed for analysis of typical polarized X-ray sources, allowing implementation of complex, polarization-aware analysis pipelines. Where applicable, the data formats are consistent with the common display and analysis tools used by the community, e.g., the binned count spectra can be fed into XSPEC (ascl:9910.005), along with the corresponding response functions, for doing standard spectral analysis. All ixpeobssim simulation and analysis tools are fully configurable via the command line.

Astromodels defines models for likelihood or Bayesian analysis of astrophysical data. Though designed for analysis in the spectral domain, it can also be used as a toolbox containing functions of any variable. Astromodels is not a modeling package; it provides the tools to build a model as complex as one needs. A separate package such as 3ML (ascl:2506.018) is needed to fit the model to the data.

The Multi-Mission Maximum Likelihood framework (3ML) provides a common high-level interface and model definition for coherent and intuitive modeling of sources using all the available data, no matter their origin. Astrophysical sources are observed by different instruments at different wavelengths with an unprecedented quality, and each instrument and data type has its own ad-hoc software and handling procedure. 3ML's architecture is based on plug-ins; the package uses the official software of each instrument under the hood, thus guaranteeing that 3ML is always using the best possible methodology to deal with the data of each instrument. Though Maximum Likelihood is in the name for historical reasons, 3ML is an interface to several Bayesian inference algorithms such as MCMC and nested sampling as well as likelihood optimization algorithms.