CATMA vs QualCoder

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.

QualCoder is free, open-source software for qualitative data analysis on Linux, macOS and Windows. It supports coding text, images, audio and video, organizing codes in hierarchies, and keeping journals and memos alongside analysis. Users can generate reports, most of which can be exported as HTML, ODT, plain text or Excel. Projects and codebooks can be exported using the REFI-QDA standard, while codebooks can be imported from plain text or CSV files. Coding data is stored in a SQLite database in the project's data folder. QualCoder is intended for one person at a time; simultaneous access to a project can corrupt its database. VLC is optional for general use but required for audio or video coding. Optional AI features support topic exploration, assisted coding, text analysis and code chats. AI is off by default, and supported providers include cloud services and local models such as Ollama. Provider API access is pay-per-use and may incur charges for each request.