- 🚀 Register now: https://openqda.org
- 📔 Read the user guide: https://openqda.github.io/user-docs/
- 📢 Give feedback and join the discussion: https://github.com/openqda/openqda/discussions
- 🏗️ Read the developer guide: https://openqda.github.io/openqda/
- 📧 Contact us: [email protected]
OpenQDA is a sustainable, free/libre Open Source Software for collaborative qualitative data analysis.
It's developed by the ZeMKI (Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research) at the University of Bremen.
It's publicly available under https://openqda.org and is hosted on servers, integrated in the university's infrastructure.
If you are a user and want to learn OpenQDA, then we advise you to read the user documentation.
If you are still unsure about what OpenQDA is or does, then please consult our FAQ.
We provide a citation file to enable automated citations of this work.
Note: Every release obtains a DOI from Zenodo and there is also a base DOI for the project as a whole, which will always redirect to the latest current release: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11195871
If you prefer manual citation, then please use the following citation example (APA style):
Belli, A., Küster, J., Matayeva, L., Hohmann, F., Sinner, P., Krüger, G., Wolf, K., & Hepp, A. (2025). OpenQDA (1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14772936
The "aTrain" plugin for transcription is developed and licensed by Armin Haberl, Jürgen Fleiß, Dominik Kowald, Stefan Thalmann and is published under
Haberl, A., Fleiß, J., Kowald, D., Thalmann, S., 2023. “Take the aTrain. Introducing an Interface for the Accesible Transcription of Interviews.”, University of Graz, School of Business, Economics and Social Sciences Working Paper 2023-02.
Please note, that if you use the auto-transcription feature in OpenQDA then you must cite their work in your publication under certain conditions. Please read their license for this.
We are constantly updating our development roadmap in regard to the upcoming releases.
If you have reached this section, chances are high your either want one of the following:
- run OpenQDA on your own infrastructure
- understand OpenQDA or hack a local version of OpenQAD
- improve OpenQDA
- learn research software engineering with OpenQDA as an example project
We provide a hosted developer documentation via https://openqda.github.io/openqda/
Note, the (markdown) files are also located in within the /docs folder.
In addition to the development guides above, we also provide API docs:
- client api docs
- backend api docs (coming soon!)
OpenQDA is a sustainable, free/libre Open Source Software for collaborative qualitative research. Copyright (C) 2024 ZeMKI, Universität Bremen
The core software of this project is released under the APGL-3.0 license, which you can read in our license file.
The OpenQDA logo and images are created by Florian Hohmann and are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which you can read in our media license file.
Plugins (which includes services) may be distributed under a different license. Please see their own license files in their respective directories