KH Coder vs Voyant Tools

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.

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.