NVIVO vs Devonthink

Posted by Paul Korm
Jul 4, 2017 at 07:51 PM

Well, one difference is that NVIVO costs almost 8 times the top of the line edition of DEVONthink.

NVivo is structured mainly for qualitative data analysis, or QDA. It is useful as a research tool in many fields, and specializes in “coding” text, images, audio, social media, and so on. As NVivo’s site says “NVivo is software that supports qualitative and mixed methods research. It’s designed to help you organize, analyze and find insights in unstructured, or qualitative data like: interviews, open-ended survey responses, articles, social media and web content.”

DEVONthink is far less specialized. While it is certainly used by researchers, it is actually not all that useful for QDA because its annotation features are mainly the same as macOS’s annotation features in Preview. I.e., very limited. DEVONthink has also gone through a lot of issues since Sierra messed up PDFKit—the basis for DEVONthink handling of PDFs. DEVONthink is focused on document management, primarily, and secondarily on document creation, note taking, and annotation. There is nothing that DEVONthink does in those secondary areas that is any better than the vanilla apps that come with macOS, and DEVONthink is far less adept at document creation and editing than the variety of specialized apps available on macOS. DEVONthink keeps a concordance of words and metadata properties (tags, PDF properties, etc.) for all documents that it knows about in its databases, and uses that concordance to suggest matches, similar documents, and provide speedy search. Back years ago (a decade) when DEVONthink first came out, these concordance features were call DEVONthink’s “AI”. It’s sort of a quaint term today, in my opinion, DEVONthink’s “AI” is no where near real AI.

Anyway, you can get demos of each product, NVivo and DEVONthink, and the developers are pretty helpful. If you have no idea what QDA is, then get a DEVONthink demo. Buying NVivo for document management would be like buying 5-ton van to pick up the groceries.

Dellu wrote:
I know most people in here are users of Devonthink. I was wondering if
>any of you have tried NVIVO, a professional research tool for annotating
>and aggregating data. How are the two different? In what contexts one
>can preferably use NVIVO over Devonthink, and vise versa?