Free Softwares / Tools for Researchers

This is a list of free (absolutely — no trial or limited free) softwares or tools that is useful for researchers — (of social sciences especially, but I assume they are useful to all).

This is an ongoing list and I will continue adding to this as I find new tools

Statistics / Statistical Analysis

The likes of SPSS is very expensive but there are good alternatives.

1. JASP: JASP is an open-source project supported by the University of Amsterdam with nice looking interface that offers standard analysis procedures in both their classical and Bayesian form. What I like about JASP the most is, if you save your Excel file in Open Document Format or CSV, it can directly use that file to analyze (no need to define variables/values as in SPSS). Available for Mac / Windows & Linux.

1. jamovi: It is a fork of JASP. What I like about it is that I can directly look into the spreadsheet and do edit/filter/other things on the program itself and the results are immediately visible.
2. PSPP: PSPP is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions. I haven’t used it much but it does look a good one.

There are other free statistical softwares available as well — like SOFA Statistics — that look promising but I haven’t tried them.

Survey / Forms

When I started researching, the most time consuming part of the job was coding the survey forms and entering them into Lotus 1–2–2 or Excel or SPSS for analysis. These days, I create online forms — either the participants fill it directly or even if they fill paper form, I can easily enter them.

1. KoboToolBox: Usually for non-profit, anyone can sign up free. They allow collection of upto 5,000 responses each month. That’s more than enough for me. Although a bit of learning required at start to create form, what I like most about it is its ability to do branching and output in various format (including SPSS files).
2. Google Forms: Tied to your Google account, and the files are in you Google Drive, this is easy and quick solution. Output in Excel (or Open Document format or CSV or TSV). If you use Outlook email, you have similar solution with Microsoft Office Forms.
3. Tally.io: Not completely free but still the free version is more than good enough for surveys. Very innovative with lots of possibilities, cool look and most importantly data can be integrated to many services — including Google sheets.