Although quite an amount of symbolic manipulation is possible, PARI does badly compared to systems like Axiom, Magma, Maple, Mathematica, Maxima, or Reduce on such tasks, e.g.~multivariate polynomials, formal integration, etc. On the other hand, the three main advantages of the system are its speed, the possibility of using directly data types which are familiar to mathematicians, and its extensive algebraic number theory module (from the above-mentioned systems, only Magma provides similar features).