Transana vs Voyant Tools

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.

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.