DiscoverText vs Quirkos

DiscoverText is a cloud service for mining, annotating and analyzing multilingual text collections with machine learning. It can work with free text and metadata from surveys, customer feedback, CRM, chats, email, public comments, X/Twitter and RSS feeds. Users can build reusable classifiers called sifters to find relevant material and sort it into topics, sentiment or other categories. Its described process combines machine classification with human annotation, crowdsourcing, adjudication, measurement and iteration. For eDiscovery, it offers deduplication, near-duplicate clustering and document redaction that can produce Bates-stamped, spreadsheet-indexed PDF collections. Students and professors may receive free access, training and project support from the founder; academic group licenses are also listed as free. API access is limited to licensed Enterprise users granted an API key. Documented API operations include projects, archives, buckets, datasets, deduplication, clustering and tag clouds. The maker says it no longer collects Twitter data in real time and is not connected to Facebook’s open API. Professional costs $99 a month; Enterprise costs $3,000 a month.

Quirkos is qualitative analysis software for exploring and interpreting text data. It imports Word documents, plain text, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and text pasted from websites or other programs. Codes are displayed visually as users work, with support for groups, hierarchies, color coding, overlap views, and word clouds. Query View can search text, filter by data criteria, and compare data groups side by side. Quirkos Cloud adds live synchronization, editing, and chat, with unlimited collaborators and collaborations at no extra fee. Project data can be exported to Excel for use in SPSS or R, or in REFI-QDA format for other qualitative programs. Quirkos Transcribe converts audio and video into transcripts, accepts files up to 2 GB, and includes 100 free minutes for Cloud users. Transcribe runs in the web app; its five best-supported selectable languages are English, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Cloud plans include student, academic and nonprofit, public sector, and commercial options. The Student plan costs $5 a month, billed annually; an offline licence for one computer costs 69.00 USD once for lifetime use.