Free Qualitative Data Analysis Software For MAC: Best List

free qualitative data analysis software for MAC

Frankly speaking, there isn’t a long list of free qualitative data analysis software for MAC. Still, there is a choice of tools to help you sort, organize and analyze a large amount of text or other types of data.

Nowadays, computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) is a must for researchers and data professionals. You can use it to analyze a focus group transcripts, journal articles, legal documents, books, images, paintings, and many other types of information. Of course the free options have a lot of limitations but still, you can use them to get done a lot of work. Here is a list of the best free qualitative data analysis tools for MAC, you can consider if you lack the budget.

1. RDQA

RDQA is a R package for Qualitative Data Analysis, and it is a free qualitative analysis software application ( with BSD license). It works on Linux/FreeBSD, Mac OSX and Windows.

You can use it to enter data into a database and codify the data by 4 levels: cases, codes, code categories, and annotations. RDQA is used mainly by small and midsize organizations but it also has large enterprise users.

RDQA is easy to use tool by many statisticians and data experts when performing analysis of textual data. However, for now, it only supports just plain text formatted data.

Kye features and benefits:

  • Import documents from plain text or on-the-fly
  • Import PDF highlights.
  • Support non-English documents.
  • File Editing after coding.
  • Advanced Graphic user interface.
  • Memos of documents, coding, project, codes, files and more.
  • Single-file (*.rqda) format, which is basically a SQLite database.
  • Organize codes into code categories, which is key to theory building.
  • Organize files into file categories.
  • Apply attributes to file, which is useful for content analysis.
  • Rename files, codes, code categories, and cases
  • Calculate the relation between two codings, given the coding indexes
  • Give a summary of coding and inter-code relationships And more …
  • Website: http://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org/

2. TAMS Analyzer

When it comes to free qualitative data analysis software for MAC, this is one of the most popular choices. TAMS (stands for Text Analysis Markup System) is an open source tool that allows you to quickly code sections of text.

The software runs on Macintosh and Linux platforms.

Despite TAMS is generally employed to encode discourse and ethnographic documents (such as interviews), you can also use it to analyze almost any plain text.

You can import documents, fields notes or interview transcript and seamlessly code them by clicking on code from your list.

The Macintosh version of the program also includes full support for transcription (back space, insert time code, jump to time code, etc.) when working with data on sound files.

Key features and benefits:

  • PDF coding and analysis support
  • Image (jpg, etc.) coding
  • Layout for video coding
  • Multi-user support using MySQL as a server
  • Multimedia support
  • XML file formats
  • Hot code sets
  • Ability to set comments for both ranges of text and individual tags Many others….
  • Website: http://tamsys.sourceforge.net/

3. HyperRESEARCH

HyperRESEARCH is a flexible and powerful tool that assists you in data analysis and theory building. From coding and retrieval to analysis and reporting, the tool got you covered.

HyperRESEARCH is an intuitive software solution that requires near-zero learning curve to help you get started. The program is for MAC and Windows and allows you to move your work seamlessly between Mac and Windows.

They offer premium and free option. You can download the Free Limited Edition. The size and complexity of your study is limited, but otherwise, you can access all the features. You can use the Free Limited Edition as long as you like.

Key features and benefits:

  • Very easy to use – you can start coding right away with simple, intuitive steps.
  • Any piece of data in a source for coding—text, image, audio, video, or PDF (coming soon).
  • Go beyond coding and categorizing—use the Theory Builder to frame and test a hypothesis.
  • See your codes in the margin of your data for easy scanning.
  • Protect privacy by automatically masking sensitive information.
  • Many others…..
  • Website: http://www.researchware.com

4. QDA Miner Lite

QDA Miner Lite is also one of the top free qualitative data analysis software for MAC.

You can use the tool for the analysis of textual data (such as interview and news transcripts), open-ended answers from a market research, as well as for the analysis of still images.

Generally, QDA Miner Lite is a Windows application. However, there are ways to run it on a Mac OS computer.

Key CAQDAS features and benefits:

  • Importation of documents from plain text, RTF, HTML, PDF and also data from Excel, MS Access, CSV, and other text files.
  • Importation from transcription tools and from other qualitative coding software such as Altas.ti, HyperResearch, and many others.
  • Intuitive coding using codes organized in a tree structure.
  • Code frequency analysis with charts and tag clouds.
  • Export tables to XLS, Tab Delimited, CSV formats, and Word format.
  • Export graphs to BMP, PNG, JPEG, WMF formats.
  • Interface and help file in English, French, and Spanish.
  • Website: https://provalisresearch.com/

5. KH Coder

KH Coder is a free software for qualitative data analysis, quantitative content analysis, and text mining for MAC and Windows. The tool provides a variety of statistical analysis functions by using MySQL, ChaSen, and R as back-end tools. You can analyze Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Korean and Russian language data and text with KH Coder.

KH Coder provides an opportunity for a variety of types of statistical analysis and functions using tools such as Stanford POS Tagger, Snowball stemmer, MySQL and R.

Key features and benefits:

  • Qualitative and quantitative analysis.
  • Text meaning.
  • Utilized for computational linguistics.
  • On word-level: frequency list, searching, KWIC concordance, collocation stats, correspondence analysis…
  • On category-level: developing your own categories, frequency list, cross tabulation, correspondence analysis, multi-dimensional scaling…
  • On documents level – searching, clustering, and naive bayes classifier.
  • Website: http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/