ATLAS.ti Reviews

Qualitative data analysis is time-consuming, and a lot of it is spent organizing, coding, and validating your data. ATLAS.ti offers a number of tools to help make the process more straightforward. Of course, the very first step is to import the data into ATLAS.ti. From text documents to video and audio files, the software supports a wide variety of data. It even imports data directly from Evernote, transcription tools, reference manager software, survey programs, and social media. In fact, you can have ATLAS.ti collect data from Twitter as long as the tweets have been published within the past week.

But this is only the beginning, as ATLAS.ti shines the most when it comes to organizing and analyzing data. Unlike some of its competitors, the software allows you to set quotations without immediately coding your data. Instead, you can go over your data, add summaries, and write your interpretations for each quotation without falling into the over-coding trap. Only when you get a sense of the direction your research is going should you start coding your data, making sure each code has at least a few quotations.

It goes without saying that it’s possible to add codes manually, but you can also use the Auto Coding feature to save time. ATLAS.ti offers five ways of searching and grouping information: concepts, text search (word cloud or list), expert search with regular expressions, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and sentiment analysis. The process is not fully automated, and you can review all results before coding the data.

When doing qualitative data research, it’s common for ideas to pop up. That’s why ATLAS.ti comes with a memo function to write down your thoughts and attach them to quotations or other data entries.

Qualitative research is more than just reading documents – especially when it comes to marketing. Interviews are a big part of it, and ATLAS.ti comes prepared to help you organize multimedia data smoothly. If you conducted your interviews online on Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or any other supported platform, you can import the automatic transcripts. That being said, ATLAS.ti also comes with a built-in transcription tool that you can use without the need for third-party software.

Creating quotes, writing memos, and adding comments work the same way as with text. In other words, you can create multimedia quotations while listening to the audio or watching the video with no interruptions. It’s also possible to code those multimedia quotations to add them to your reports in a later note. Another handy feature is the video snapshot tool. This lets you take a picture of any given frame of the video you’re watching for further analysis.

You can have all the information in the world – but if you aren’t able to create correlations, it’s impossible to come up with any conclusions. ATLAS.ti offers various tools to help you interpret your research findings.

One of our favorites is ATLAS.ti Networks, which presents the information visually so you can manipulate and display all entity types of your projects as nodes. This includes quotes, codes, memos, documents – just to name a few. Of course, you can also add all kinds of relations between the nodes. For example, it’s easy to link a sentence like “qualitative data analysis offers in-depth knowledge of a subject” to the nodes “qualitative data analysis” and “in-depth knowledge”.

Another way to quickly find correlations in your data is by using the code document table, which counts the frequency of codes across documents. The software comes with various settings for you to play with to make sure that the data you’re reading is relevant. For example, if you’re going through answers by gender and have 15 females and five males, you might want to enable the normalization option. Other analysis tools provided include global filters, smart codes, and code co-occurrence.

Doing qualitative data analysis is already difficult. So, it’s important that the software you’re using doesn’t make the process even more challenging. Fortunately, ATLAS.ti is quite intuitive. It also helps that you can do the same thing in different ways, with the software adapting to your work method and not the other way around. For example, you can create quotations by right-clicking the text section or clicking on the corresponding button in the software’s ribbon.

Everything you create on ATLAS.ti (codes, quotations, memos, etc.) comes with its own manager. This is especially important for keeping your workspace organized, as you can group codes, change their colors, add operational definitions to their comments – the sky is the limit. It’s also simple to export either your entire project or specific sections. With just a few clicks, the software can export information as an SPSS job, statistical data, codebook, or document.

ATLAS.ti offers licenses for different purposes, which come with various price points. Keep in mind that all the following prices don’t include tax. While students can get ATLAS.ti for the semester for as little as $8.50 per month, education professionals can grab a yearly license for $240 ($20 per month). Non-commercial and government users also get a discounted rate of $380 per year ($31.67 per month).

ATLAS.ti is the most expensive when purchased for commercial use. If it’s just for one user, you can get a monthly or yearly plan. Bear in mind that the shorter billing cycle only provides access to ATLAS.ti Web and costs $50. The annual plan is the same price per month, but you’ll pay the whole $600 upfront. However, this license allows you to use ATLAS.ti on PC or Mac in addition to the browser version.

Finally, there’s the option to obtain a multiuser license, which can have concurrent or fixed seats. Surprisingly enough, there’s no benefit from an economy of scale. The 5- and 10-user licenses are more expensive per person than the individual subscription, unless you get the 3-year plan that comes with a 35% discount.

You can try out ATLAS.ti through its generous 90-day free trial. For the first five days, you get