Magnolia

The QDA tool built for
researchers, not profits.

Magnolia is free and open-source QDA (qualitative data analysis) software. Powerful coding, graphical queries, relationship maps, and a rich analysis suite — all running locally on your machine.

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Free forever · Released under the EUPL

Magnolia's coding interface, showing an interview transcript with coloured codes applied to passages of text, alongside documents, codes, memos, and query panels.
€0 vs €240+/year elsewhere
100% open source · EUPL licensed
QDPX native open standard
3 platforms, fully local

Open science needs open tools.

Doing qualitative research shouldn't cost a small fortune. And you shouldn't need a subscription to keep accessing your data.

Magnolia lets you regain power over your research. After all, it's your project.

Graphical query builder

Powerful coding, powerful queries.

Magnolia's intuitive, graphical query builder lets you interrogate your data by dragging code nodes and logical operators onto a canvas.

  • Results update in real time — even while you're still coding.
  • Save queries and re-run them whenever your data changes.
  • Scope any query to specific documents, folders, types, or tags.
Magnolia's graphical query builder, with code nodes connected by logical operators on a canvas and live results below.
Analysis suite

Interrogate your data from every angle.

Magnolia's powerful analytical tools let you explore your data and do the research you always wanted.

  • Interactive results let you click in tables, graphs, and word clouds and be taken to the underlying data.
  • Powerful grouping tools let you cluster and summarise your results.
  • Save analyses for later.
Magnolia's word frequencies analysis, showing a word count table alongside a bar chart.
Relationship maps

Map anything and everything.

Drag codes, documents, and quotes onto an interactive canvas to map the relationships in your data. Everything stays live: double-click any node and you're taken straight to it.

  • Fully interactive — your map is a navigation tool, not a static picture.
  • Attach memos to anything on the canvas.
  • Export the whole map as a clean, scalable SVG.
Magnolia's relationship map, an interactive canvas linking codes, documents, and quotes.
Transcriptions

Transcribe with ease, and code logically.

Magnolia's in-built transcription module allows you to easily transcribe audio and video files. And with synced video coding, your video and transcript have just one set of codes.

  • Support for foot pedals: simply map your chosen hotkey to the pedal, and away you go.
  • New line, new timestamp.
  • Video codes are mapped to timestamps, so your video track codes and transcript codes are the same.
Magnolia's transcription and video coding view, showing a video synced to a coded transcript with codes mapped to the video timeline.
Surveys

Explore your survey data qualitatively and quantitatively.

Magnolia's support for survey data lets you code open responses, and understand how quantitative questions were answered.

  • Survey data stays together: it isn't broken into individual documents.
  • See an overview of your results and export it as a report.
  • Support for .xlsx and .csv files.
Magnolia's survey summary page, showing 24 respondents across 14 questions, with box plots (mean, median, mode, and IQR) for numerical answers and percentage breakdowns for categorical questions.
A rich suite of analytical tools

Everything you need to interrogate your data.

Relationships
Map relationships between different things.
Codes in Documents
See which documents contain which codes.
Results in Documents
See which documents contain which query results.
Code Co-Occurrences
See which codes overlap with each other.
Code Orders
See the order in which codes appear in each document.
Code Frequencies
See how much of each document is covered by each code.
Word Frequencies
See which words often appear.
More than coding

A complete research workspace.

Memos & quotes

Attach memos to practically everything — the project, documents, text, parts of images, queries, analyses, survey questions, survey respondents, and map nodes. Save quotes as text or even images so you never lose a thought.

Transcribe audio & video

Transcribe right inside Magnolia, with foot-pedal support and timestamp-synced codes — no separate software needed.

Native QDPX

Magnolia reads and writes the open QDPX standard by default, so your projects open cleanly in Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, and others — no lock-in.

No AI · No cloud · No subscription

No AI analysis or transcription — you are the researcher. No cloud: save locally or to a network drive. And nothing locked behind a fee.

Supported document types

Bring in almost anything.

Text

.txt · .md · .markdown · .pdf · .docx · .rtf · .odt

Images

.jpg · .jpeg · .png · .gif · .webp · .tif · .tiff · .heic · .heif

Audio

.wav · .mp3 · .ogg · .flac · .m4a · .aac

Video

.mp4 · .mov · .avi

Surveys

.csv · .xlsx

.docx, .rtf, and .odt files are converted to PDF on import.

Local-first & private by design

Your data never leaves your machine.

No account, no cloud sync, no telemetry. Your project lives as a file on your own disk or network drive — exactly where you put it.

No cloud Save locally or to a network drive. Nothing is ever uploaded.
No account Download, open, and start working. There's nothing to sign up for.
No AI No AI analysis or transcription. You are the researcher.
European Union Public Licence

Free for everyone, forever.

Magnolia is released under the EUPL. Everyone is free to use it, reproduce it, change it, and share their changes. If Magnolia or a derivative is distributed, it must stay under the EUPL with its source freely available — keeping it free for everyone and disincentivising companies from profiting off it.

Download Magnolia Read the source