CATMA vs Voyant Tools

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.

Voyant Tools is a text-analysis environment for reading digital texts and building corpora from pasted text, URLs, existing collections, or uploaded files. It can extract text from HTML, Word, Excel, ODT, Pages, PDF, plain text, RTF, and XML. The default workspace brings together Cirrus, Reader, Trends, Summary, and Contexts, with more tools for examining terms, collocates, phrases, and related patterns. You can bookmark and share corpus URLs, and a corpus generally stays accessible when someone accesses it at least once a month. Voyant can also be embedded in another site with an iframe. The hosted service stores submitted texts for persistent access and logs tool activity, parameters, and IP addresses; it also uses Google Analytics. For offline work, VoyantServer runs locally, requires Java 11, and does not cache work on Voyant’s server. Voyant handles Unicode text in almost any language, though it has little language-specific functionality for semantic analysis. It is open source under GPL3, with the web application and documentation under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The plan is free.