In practice, the terms of macroarray and microarray are often interchangeable. Microarray and macroarray may be used to differentiate between spot size or the number of spots on the support. The term macroarray is usually used for the larger and fewer spot array. Many other terms exist for naming gene arrays, including biochip, DNA chip, GeneChip® (a registered trademark of Affymetrix, Inc.), and a DNA array. These gene arrays are used to analyze differential expression of two or more RNA samples.

There are also protein macroarrays that look at protein-protein interactions between the protein of interest to different proteins (or peptides) spotted on an array.