CATMA review
A free, open-source workspace for collaborative corpus annotation and humanities research.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Nov 2026
CATMA is a free, open-source application for annotating, analyzing, interpreting and visualizing texts. Its primary audience is humanities researchers, including those working in literary analysis, as well as individuals and teams managing qualitative or quantitative corpus workflows. Users can upload corpora, create custom tagsets, apply annotations, run queries, and inspect text through word clouds, distribution visualizations and DoubleTree views. Project and corpus management, sharing and export support collaborative research work.
The published offering is free rather than divided into paid tiers, so there is no plan-by-plan upgrade path to compare. Its feature set covers core corpus work: a query builder and query language, wordlists, text analysis functions, TEI-XML export and project data export. CATMA also provides a standalone deployment for local machines or private networks, giving teams an option beyond the browser-based application. That breadth suits projects that need annotation and interpretation in one environment, though it is less appropriate for buyers seeking packaged commercial tiers or documented advanced NLP functions such as sentiment analysis, entity extraction, intent detection or topic modeling.
Platform coverage is broad, with web, Windows, macOS, Linux, API and self-hosted options. Ecosystem connections include a JSON API, Git access and the GitMA Python package. The API is read-only, while collaborative project sharing and Git-related access support teams that need to manage or exchange research materials across tools. Choose CATMA for free, customizable corpus annotation with visual analysis and flexible deployment. Choose an alternative if automated NLP detection, managed commercial support or a more narrowly packaged analytics workflow is the priority.
Questions about CATMA
What does CATMA run on? Web, Windows, macOS and Linux. It runs in the cloud and self-hosted.
What does CATMA integrate with? 3 integrations: JSON API, Git access and GitMA Python package.
Who is CATMA built for? Solo users, small businesses and mid-market companies (our editorial estimate).
CATMA pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Custom tagsets support qualitative and quantitative text annotation.
- Queries, visualizations and exports support varied corpus workflows.
- Free, open-source deployment spans web, desktop and private networks.
- Where it doesn't
- No documented sentiment, entity extraction, intent detection or topic modeling.
- The JSON API is read-only.
- Standalone deployment requires local or private-network administration.
CATMA fact sheet, pricing and score →
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