KH Coder vs Transana

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.

Transana is qualitative analysis software for video, audio, image, text, PDF, and survey data on Windows and macOS. It provides automated transcription and manual transcription tools with keyboard shortcuts. Users can categorize and code material, then examine coded data through text and graphical reports, searches, and word clouds. Transana Professional handles up to four simultaneous video files and five transcripts, and supports imports including plain text, Word or RTF documents, online survey data, and still images. Professional can use ChatGPT or Claude with non-confidential data, or embedded Ollama models with confidential data. Speechmatics and Deepgram receive audio for automated transcription only after a user approves sharing each time; Faster Whisper processes audio locally. Basic and Professional store data on the user's computer and do not share user files or database information with Transana.com. Multiuser supports simultaneous work on shared data over an internet connection. The free demo has tight limits and is not intended for real analysis. The fully functional Professional trial costs $25, paid once and expires one month after purchase. Professional costs $395, paid once.