7 unique things that make Quirkos awesome

Quirkos is now 3 years old!

To celebrate, we’re taking a break from our regular programming of qualitative method posts to remind everyone why Quirkos is the best qualitative analysis software around...

1. All the colours!

Obviously I’m going to start with the most important features first. Some qualitative analysis software restricts you to only 8 colours when customising your themes. Quirkos lets you choose from 16 million colours and that may sound daft, but once you have a large coding framework, giving similar shades of colour to similar themes really makes the coding quicker. Many people find they can identify a colour a lot quicker than they can read a label. You can also easily assign meaning to colours: red things being bad, green things for the environment etc.

2. Interactive coding

It’s the moment I’ve come to love most when doing training workshops, the ‘Ahhh!’ of the audience when they see the bubbles grow for the first time when you drop text on them. And so quickly you realise that it is a lot more than a gimmick: having the size of the themes represent the coding lets you see not just that you put the code in the right place, but what topics are emerging most from your coding. It makes me feel a lot closer to my data, and seeing the themes evolve is really engaging.

3. No Save button

Quirkos is constantly saving after each action, so there is no save button in the interface. I think this initially causes some anxiety in users used to setting up an auto-save or worrying they will loose data. But eventually, it becomes so liberating to just focus on your work. If Quirkos or Windows crashes, or even if you pull out the cord on your computer, when you come back to your project it will be just as you left it.

4. Quick and free to learn.

We designed Quirkos to be simple, with the main features you need to do deep analysis and reading of your data, and no distractions from flashy or complex features. A lot of people come to Quirkos after despairing at the amount of time it takes to learn other software packages. Most people who do qualitative analysis aren’t interested in learning technical software. They just want to focus on their research ideas and the data.

All our training materials are freely available online, even our monthly webinars which (unlike others) we don’t charge for or require registration. Some CAQDAS packages can require a lot of extra training, a cost in terms of time and money that institutions sometimes forget to factor in.

5. True cross-platform freedom

Quirkos not only has the same features and interface on Windows and Mac, but is fully supported on Linux as well. And project files are completely compatible, so you can pick up and work on any computer using any operating system. If you have Windows at work and a Macbook at home, no problem. We are the only CAQDAS software to support all these platforms, and unlike Nvivo, we let you go from Mac to Windows (and back) without changing your files.

6. Free updates

When I was working with other qualitative software for my post-doc research, we had serious problems when new versions of the software came out. It would create new (and terrifying bugs), require us to buy a new licence, and made our data no longer compatible with the old version. Since academic organisations aren’t always the most speedy at installing updates, it meant that we always had issues with a collaborator using an older (or newer) version of the software that wasn’t compatible. This frustrated me so much, I have promised this will not happen in Quirkos.

Over the last 3 years we’ve released 6 updated versions of Quirkos now, and they are all free updates, backward and forward compatible. This means that there is no reason for anyone to be stuck using an old version, and even if they didn’t bother to download the free update, they can still collaborate fully with colleagues using different versions.

7. Student licences that don’t expire

In the UK, a typical PhD lasts 4 years, in the US the average is 8.2 years. If you are doing teaching as part of your scholarship or are doing doctoral studies part time, this can get even longer. That’s why our student licences don’t expire. I don’t know why our competitors sell 1 or 2 year licences for students – it always annoyed me when I was studying. Unless you are doing your masters, you’ll probably have to buy another one half way through your research. Sure, you can buy last minute after you’ve done all your data collection, but that is a bad way to do iterative qualitative analysis.

Our student licences are the same price (or cheaper) than most other one or two year licences, but are yours for life: for your postdoc career and beyond. I don’t want to see people loose access to their data, and it’s no surprise that we sell so many student licences.

So try Quirkos for yourself, and see why researchers from more than 120 universities across the world use it to make their their qualitative analysis go a bit smoother. We’ve got a one month free trial of the full, unrestricted version of Quirkos for you to download right here (that’s also the longest free trial offered for CAQDAS!).