I just passed my dissertation proposal defense and my committee recommended I use one of these two qualitative data analysis software. What are the pros and cons of each?

If the scope of my project affects your answer, my data will include: 25 interviews of 1-2 hours each and content analysis of roughly 1000 pages of court documents. I will not be coding by keywords, but rather doing line-by-line coding using a thematic approach.

I am unlikely to need to collaborate much given it is an individual project.

Bug/Quirk list, but also to help others work with importing data into Dedoose while it's not fixed yet

1. You can only load 5 media at a time to prevent it locking up in "please wait", but it loads quickly when you do it in fives.

2. If you tried to upload and it only says "Please Wait" without the "Uploading File" progress bar, don't wait. Just close the app and the upload again.

3. If you're gonna use auto-link, make sure your media's filename is max 120 characters, and any descriptor data is max 200 characters

4. ñ is accepted in descriptor upload, but gets converted to a regular n in Word file names. So if you're gonna use the auto link feature, convert all files to regular n.

5. PDFs are not searchable, neither does the conversion reflow the text. So either you search outside dedoose or convert it to Word yourself first.

6. When uploading descriptor fields, your last row is not included. So, add a dummy row at the end with whatever typed into it.

7. No whole project search and auto-code (yet?) So I used qda miner lite to extract all paragraphs to look out for before moving back to dedoose.

I'm still grateful we have access to this software and mixed methods charts for the price that is offered. But know that it still has some interesting quirks to be ironed out.

Might edit this to add my experience excerpting, coding, and analyzing.

Edit: While Excerpting and Coding:

1. When viewing the Media pane, I sorted the files using file name. But when I am viewing a specific text document, and press the next or previous media, I'm not sure what order it's following? It's not the file name for sure. Is it upload time? Can we set it to use a descriptor field or even just follow the filename instead?

Edit 2:

2. When working in a pdf, you cannot extend the excerpt into another page? and because I want to use the co-occurrence chart, I will just add the full codes into the partial excerpt

Edit 3:

3. "Normalize" feature doesn't have a setting that excludes cases/media that was not excerpted/coded. So this might seem obvious (I just mindlessly loaded everything in) but don't load all files into dedoose if you know that some of them may end up irrelevant to your counting, or delete the ones that were not used/irrelevant, because they will still be included in the normalization calculation.

4. Descriptor Fields x Codes Grid Chart - very powerful and useful to build your own charts in your own order! But 2 things are lacking. First, saving your custom chart is not yet supported (gotta click through each field again, and the list keeps refreshing so slightly annoying especially if it hangs for whatever reason and you have to restart). Second, only code counts and weights are supported, not case counts

I did a quick search but didn't find a lot of info.

Does anyone currently use this software for qualitative analysis? The student rate is just under $11/mo and I'm wondering if it's worth it. Seems like it would be useful for organizing my interviews as well as my book notes for crosschecking.

Does anyone have a good resource for understanding dedoose? I am just starting the work on analyzing my 16 week qualitative research project data and it is overwhelming. Thanks!