CATMA vs WordStat

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.

WordStat is text analysis software for examining large document collections with text mining and quantitative content analysis. It can extract frequent words and phrases, identify topics, and explore patterns with clustering, multidimensional scaling, proximity plots, and link analysis. Explorer mode surfaces words, phrases, and topics in one click. Users can apply dictionaries with Boolean, proximity, and regular-expression rules, or build document classifiers using Naïve Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbours. Listed applications include open-ended response analysis, business intelligence, news coverage analysis, and fraud detection. WordStat imports files and data from office and statistical software, PDFs, images, survey platforms, email, social media, and other sources; it exports results and graphs to spreadsheet, document, markup, and image formats. Python scripts and libraries can preprocess text. WordStat integrates with SimStat, QDA Miner, and Stata, and version 2026.1 supports Ollama, LM Studio, and custom URLs for private organization servers. It is a Windows application, with Wine-based options for macOS and Linux. The 14-day trial is fully functional; afterward, analysis is limited to a random 20% sample and most saving, export, and printing functions are disabled.