Quirkos review
A low-cost qualitative coding tool with collaboration, visualization and offline options.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Quirkos is qualitative data analysis software for researchers, educators and research teams. It supports grouped and hierarchical themes, memos, annotations, search, filters, comparisons and visualisations. The product is available as Quirkos Cloud for browser-based collaboration and as an offline desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux, with mobile access on iOS and Android. Its positioning fits teams that need structured thematic coding rather than automated text analytics.
Pricing is divided by audience and deployment. Student Cloud costs $5 per month on annual billing or $8 per month on quarterly billing, with unlimited secure cloud storage, live collaboration, project sharing and browser access. Academic and Nonprofit Cloud costs $13 per month annually; Public Sector Cloud costs $17; and Commercial Cloud costs $23. These three cloud plans include unlimited cloud storage, collaboration, project sharing and 100 free minutes of automated transcription. Offline Licence - 1 computer costs $69 one time, while Offline Licence - 2 computers costs $110 one time; both provide lifetime access to Quirkos 3 and local offline storage. A 14-day cloud trial and a separate two-week offline trial are available.
Quirkos covers the workflow around qualitative coding: projects can be compared side by side, relationships can be shown through word clouds, overlap views and code visualisations, and results can be exported to common document and dataset formats. It also supports automated audio and video transcription and connections with NVivo, MAXQDA, Atlas.ti, Excel, SPSS and R. The trade-off is analytical depth: Quirkos has no AI features, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, intent detection or topic modeling. Choose it for collaborative, visual thematic analysis at a comparatively low entry price; choose another product if automated or advanced text-analytics methods are central to the work.
Quirkos pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Hierarchical coding, search, filters and comparison views
- Cloud collaboration plus offline storage across six platforms
- Exports to Word, PDF, HTML, Excel and CSV
- Where it doesn't
- No AI features, sentiment analysis or entity extraction
- No intent detection or topic modeling
- Cloud pricing varies by sector and billing term
Quirkos fact sheet, pricing and score →
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