Comparing costs of qualitative analysis software in 2026

In the last few years there have been a lot of changes in the software offerings for qualitative analysis. The big three companies have become the big two, as Lumivero acquired QSR Software and NVivo, and then acquired ATLAS.ti. And since then, prices for ATLAS.ti, NVivo and MAXQDA have increased significantly.

Annual student pricing

According to our tracking, a year of access for NVivo has gone up from $99 in 2023 to $130 today, while ATLAS.ti has gone from $102 to $142: 31% and 39% increases respectively in just 3 years. MAXQDA may still be independent, but their prices have also increased 20% for a student, from $94 in 2023 a year to $114 today.

Quirkos on the other hand dropped our annual student subscription rate in 2024, and have kept our prices at the same rate since then, equivalent to $5 a month. Other cloud platforms for qualitative analysis include $18/m for Delve and $13/m for Dedoose. That leaves Quirkos around half or a third of alternatives, plus we still offer permanent, lifetime offline licences for $69.

Annual academic pricing

If the increases for student access to CAQDAS seem steep, they are even more extreme for academic access. Since 2020, an annual subscription for MAXQDA has gone up 60%, and for ATLAS.ti the price more than doubled. We couldn't find comparative prices for NVivo over that time (as how they charge and what is included has changed so much) but an NVivo subscription has gone up 10% in the last year alone.

While most users don't see the cost of these, as they are being paid for by their university or department, for those who want one of these packages themselves, or need to pay for them out of grant funding, these increases are significant and are draining higher education at a time of tight budgets. In contrast, Quirkos hasn't increased our academic annual subscription since it was first introduced in 2020, and this is now 1/3 of the price of NVivo, even before you include the collaboration add-on ($100 a user), functionality which Quirkos Cloud includes for free.

Feature comparisons

It's fair to argue that tools like NVivo, MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti have capabilities for much larger qualitative projects, working with hundreds of sources, or working directly with video and audio data. Quirkos has always aimed to have a small number of features, an easy to use interface, rather than support large scale projects with hundreds or thousands of sources or codes. We focus on smaller in-depth projects, because we believe that's what most qualitative researchers work with. We also have research backgrounds ourselves, and know that it's getting deep into the data that is rewarding, not struggling with complex feature sets.

So why would costs have increased so much for other qualitative software? Obviously these firms now have venture capital owners, shareholders and the like that demand increasing profits and returns on their investment. Server hosting has currently remained flat (at least for us), but with the increased costs of RAM and storage due to the AI bubble, these are likely to increase in the future too. And this is likely the main reason for a large portion of these increases.

AI costs

As I speculated two years ago, the large number of prompts and tokens needed for parsing rich qualitative data would quickly become expensive for companies implementing AI ingestion. While the large qualitative software tools have added 'free' AI interpretation in a limited way, this is an expensive offering, and the costs of this are almost certainly part of the price rises which have accelerated in the last two years. If you want more than the the free trials of these AI features, you pay significantly for them: the MAXQDA AI assist is a $132 add-on, even with "Limited capacity for extensive use". NVivo's AI Assistant is now a $270 add-on, and the previously free auto-coding by theme feature has been removed. The ATLAS.ti AI tool recommends you only use documents with less than 500 words to limit token costs, which is likely around a 10th of a single qualitative interview.

These tools still have limited use for in-depth qualitative research, and they may be incompatible with university policies for student work or popular analytical approaches like thematic analysis. We still maintain that most qualitative researchers don't want AI summaries and interpretation of their data, at least until it is more accurate, doesn't rely on sharing data with third parties, and is implemented ethically and sustainably.

Transcription

The one AI assisted feature Quirkos added due to customer requests, is our automated transcription service. But we took a different approach, developing and hosting our own server, so that we can offer true end-to-end encryption, and not share your data with any other third parties. Both NVivo and MAXQDA outsource and share data for transcription with Speechmatics, who may then share your data with 35 other companies, and do not guarantee to keep your data in the EU or UK. ATLAS.ti doesn't say who they outsource the transcription to (likely a GDPR violation itself), but notes that data will be sent out of the EU.

Their pricing is also eye watering: for MAXQDA it's $150 for 20 hours ($7.50/hr), for NVivo it's $560 for 50 hours transcription ($11/hr), while Quirkos Transcribe is just $45 for 150 hours ($.30/hr). In our own testing a few years ago, we also found our service to be faster and more accurate, and that includes commercial tools like otter.ai and the often ridiculed transcription in Microsoft Teams. In fact, it continues to be cheaper to buy Quirkos Cloud and the transcription add-on, than use our competitors' transcription products, even if you never use Quirkos - and we know that many people do this.

A promise

Quirkos remains the cheapest mainstream option for qualitative analysis software, while our competitors have in some cases doubled their prices over the last few years. But I want to go further, because I know from friends and colleagues how tough funding in academia is at the moment.

We are NOT going to increase the cost of any of our Quirkos offerings, and we promise not to increase them for at least the next 2 years.

We are also not going to reduce any of our feature sets (in fact we have improvements and optimizations in testing at the moment) or replace our human support team with chatbots. None of the content on our blog or website will be written by AI, as we prefer to commission experts in the field. We are also not going to add AI assisted 'analysis' for qualitative data, because it continues to be low quality, expensive and not what our customers want - they want to keep their data private, and decide for themselves how it should be interpreted.

So if you want to try software made for researchers, by researchers, and have certainty over the course of your project or grant about what costs you are committing to, try Quirkos today for free! With Quirkos Cloud, you'll get live collaboration, unlimited project storage and a free 100 minutes of transcription to try, and we bet you'll save a tonne of time in learning software, and all our online training and documentation is free. If you just need something simple, Quirkos is for you!

To do these comparisons, we've kept to USD, so there will be some currency fluctuations, and tried to find equivalent periods and products, which is difficult as options vary from 3, 6, 1 year or 2 year subscriptions in some cases. We did comparison for offline licences too, but many of our competitors have changed terms or removed these options completely over the last decade. Quirkos is still at least half of the cost of our competitors here.