KH Coder vs WordStat

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.

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.