In simple English
OpenQDA is a free tool for researchers who study words, interviews, and human behavior. Several people can log in at the same time and tag parts of a text document. You can run it on your own server or use the public version provided by the University of Bremen. It costs you nothing in money, but you need your own server to run it privately. The project is actively maintained by a university research center.
What it is
OpenQDA is a web application for qualitative data analysis, built with PHP and released under the AGPL-3.0 licence (a strict open-source licence requiring you to share your code if you modify and host it for others). It provides a shared workspace where teams can organize documents, apply codes, and discuss findings together.
What it is good for
Academic researchers, students, and user-experience professionals who need to code interview transcripts or field notes as a team without paying for expensive commercial software.
- Allows multiple people to code and analyze text together in real time.
- Free and open source, backed by an academic institution.
- Provides detailed user and developer documentation to help you get started.
- Requires a server and PHP knowledge if you want to host it yourself.
- Uses the AGPL-3.0 licence, which has strict sharing rules if you modify the code.
- Small community with 81 stars, so you may need to solve hosting problems on your own.
commercial qualitative data analysis software like MAXQDA or NVivo
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git clone https://github.com/openqda/openqda.git cd openqda composer install