Congrats on passing the proposal! I agree with much of what has been said. I would only ever recommend Dedoose for collaborative projects. NVivo is better for individual projects. Like Methods-Geek, I have also switched to MAXQDA. The reason for that is that it is far superior to all the other programs for integrating both qualitative and quantitative logics of analysis. For instance, qualitative codes can be easily converted into quantitative document variables in MAXQDA, but it was almost impossible to do when I was using NVivo. Granted, that was a decade ago, but I have not regretted the switch.

I use both, below are my impressions, hope it helps, cheers. Dedoose Pros: it is simpler, much easier to collaborate with (cloud based) and is payable on a monthly use basis, Cons : since it is browser based, can get slow and crash, also although you can easily modify your coding tree to create sub codes, in context, it is difficult to split a code, once the excerpt is coded you can relabel it as something else but not easily break it into smaller coded excerpts. I feel this lack of in-text flexibility could potentialy impact your analysis as it makes it harder to evolve from your initial, first cycle coding tree. Nvivo Pros: you can sub code excerpts (lump and detail) including from within -soon to be- parent code excerpts, or on the other hand merge codes (split and gather) at will. the software is computer based, no lagging, very rare crashing. Cons: it is expensive (easily worth 20 months of Dedoose subscription), the learning curve is longuer, it is difficult to collaborate with, but not impossible (you either need to coordinate coders to regularily export and then you gather and consolidate NVP files, or have access to Nvivo servers/ Nvivo for teams which is very expensive-in the thousands USD per year). in brief, it depends: the shorter the analysis timeframe, the more collaborative= Dedoose; the longuer the analysis timeframe, the less collaborative (i.e. PhD thesis)=Nvivo

I teach a class on Qualitative Data Analysis and I routinely introduce my students to Dedoose, so I can testify that it is full-featured analysis package. If money is an issue, one alternative that you might check out is QDA Miner Lite, which is free. (However, the full-featured version of QDA Miner is quite expensive because it has many features that are not found in other programs.)