I forget what MATLAB's student/private licensing is down to, these days; it might be competitive.
I never got the feeling it was a very practical environment for circuits. I don't think they have a solver as advanced as SPICE; but they might've changed things a lot since then, and my experience was with Simulink, not Simscape. Simulink, yes you can select and build components, assemble circuits, and simulate them, but it's a lot more janky than a proper schematic capture system, and IIRC only supported fixed timestep Newton integration (which is to say: only as good as Falstad web simulator(!)).
Multisim (v11 was the last I used) is a fine SPICE environment, and like all(?) low budget/free simulators, is based on XSPICE (with some PSPICE compatibility/extensions, and a proprietary digital code language, because nobody actually likes XSPICE's digital primitives).
If you're wondering, "low budget" includes Altium (which has the same base, different extensions). Go figure...
As such, it includes all the drawbacks that the ancient XSPICE backend offers. Get used to adjusting simulation parameters.
It's not very suitable for large (multi-sheet, hierarchical) designs, but it is quite possible to realize complete designs, from entry, to simulation, to layout (via Ultiboard, if provided).
Tim