You’ll spend hours in your transcripts. They should be pleasant to read and easy to get around. The minimap shows the big picture, the chat view keeps the conversation easy to follow, and extracts, codes, and themes are all one click away.
Code extracts, organize and revise your codes, develop themes, take notes, and review your analysis. The core workflow is all there, without burying it under a pile of features.
The path from transcript to theme stays visible, with the analytical decisions made by you. Your research stays on your device, and the whole project can be exported in open formats.
Nothing. It’s free.
I might add a small one-time fee in a future upgrade to help cover development costs, but there will never be subscriptions, ads, "premium addons", or any of that nonsense.
The app is still in beta though, so keep that in mind and maintain backups of your data.
Thematic Thing is built for reflexive thematic analysis and similar kinds of qualitative research.
It’s well-suited for small to medium-sized projects. Especially, if you’re just learning thematic analysis.
You can clean-up transcripts, code your data, develop themes, keep notes, and review your work; all without wrestling with a huge all-purpose QDAS full of features you’ll probably never use.
Yes, you can.
You can pass a project back and forth, as a single file, and leave comments in discussion threads linked to text fragments, codes, themes, and other parts of the project. It’s very handy for student–supervisor feedback.
Just keep in mind that it’s not a cloud app: there’s no real-time collaboration. You export the project, send it (by email) to another person and then import the received file once the review is done.
Not in v1.
Coding, theme development, and analysis are all manual on purpose. The design is to help the researcher with the analysis, not have an AI model quietly do it for them.
On-device audio transcription with academically-sound data cleanup and granular LLM-assisted data analysis (also on-device) are next on the development roadmap.
Your research stays on your device.
There is no cloud back-end and all work happens locally.
You can also export full projects, including codes, themes and notes, as well as individual transcripts as plain CSV files and continue working in another tool at any point.
A Mac running the current version of macOS.
An M1 Mac or later with 8 GB of RAM is enough.
Intel Macs are supported in v1, but support will end with the v2 release.
Windows support is planned for later once the AI features are ready.
I built Thematic Thing because most qualitative analysis software is far more complicated than it needs to be. Enterprise tools are bloated and expensive; the nicer cloud apps come with subscriptions and lock-in; open-source alternatives charge in headache and nerve. It’s surprisingly hard to find a simple thematic analysis app that makes reading and coding transcripts feel easy.
The first version was built for my MSc research project in UX design. I’m a software engineer, I conduct UX research myself, and I keep developing the app for personal use and for anyone else who wants a more pleasant experience of working with transcripts.
