KH Coder vs Quirkos

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.

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.