CATMA vs KH Coder

CATMA is a free tool for computer-assisted text markup and analysis, designed for qualitative text studies, especially literary studies. Users can upload corpora, share projects, create tagsets, and apply overlapping annotations. Work can be exploratory or taxonomy-based, qualitative or quantitative, and individual or collaborative. Its Analyze module provides interactive visualizations such as word clouds, distribution graphs, and Double Tree. The web application runs in common browsers on macOS, Windows, or Linux and needs a stable internet connection. CATMA Standalone can run on a local machine or private network, including settings without internet access. Projects can be exported as text, TEI-XML, or CSV; data is also accessible through Git, the GitMA Python package, or the JSON API. The hosted service stores data in Germany and makes automatic backups at least daily. CATMA says its server data is not encrypted at rest, though off-site backups are encrypted, and advises against uploading sensitive data. Standalone defaults to single-user use; some features need additional configuration or are unavailable.

KH Coder is software for quantitative content analysis, text mining, and computational linguistics. It can be used with free-response survey answers, interview records, newspaper articles, and other text. The analysis options include word-frequency lists, keyword searches, KWIC, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, co-occurrence networks, correspondence analysis, self-organizing maps, and coding cross-tabulations. Visualizations include network views with betweenness centrality and community detection, correspondence-analysis plots, heatmaps, line charts, and bubble plots. Statistical analyses can be viewed with the source-text context, and analysis can run without an internet connection. The English site lists text support for Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, and Spanish. KH Coder runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with on-premise deployment. Users can customize it by editing R and MySQL code. The free Windows Starting Edition limits analyzable data and some features and is an older beta; the paid Base Edition is presented as the full version. The Mac Edition costs $99.00 USD once and requires Apple silicon, macOS 11 or later, and 5 GB of available disk space.