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Rémi Coignard-Friedman Recherche qualitative · Formation & Coaching

Software

NVivo or open-source QDA: the right tool, not the best-selling one

I am a certified NVivo trainer, and I also train on open-source tools. There is no contradiction: a lone doctoral student, a twelve-person lab and an international team have neither the same needs nor the same budget. This page helps you choose before paying for a licence.

NVivo
Proprietary · Lumivero

NVivo

The institutional standard. Its real strength is not coding — every tool codes — but everything that comes after: crosstab queries, cases and attributes, coder comparison, links to quantitative data.

Choose it if You work as a team on one corpus, you need crosstab matrices, or your institution already holds a site licence.
Watch out for The subscription model: what matters for a dissertation is not the first-year price but the total cost over four years.
Taguette
QualCoder
Open source · no licence

Libre QDA

A complete, free analysis workflow. Taguette for collaborative coding in a browser, with no install; QualCoder to go further — reports, simple matrices, audio and image corpora.

Choose it if You work alone or in a pair on a text corpus of reasonable size — which describes most dissertations — and you want to keep control of your data and your file formats.
Watch out for No fine-grained attribute handling and no automated coder comparison. On large team projects you hit the ceiling quickly.

The first question to ask

Not “which software is best”, but: how many people will code, and will you have to demonstrate consistency between them? If the answer is “one”, open source is almost always enough. If it is “three, and the committee or the funder will ask”, NVivo earns its price.

Software does not do the analysis, and clicking is not thinking. A tidy coding tree can say nothing; a fully coded corpus can lead nowhere. The tool records one thing only: the reasoning you put into it — and it makes that reasoning visible, or not. That reasoning is what my training works on, whatever the tool.