The full qualitative workflow, in one place you control.
From your first research question to written findings: shaping the question, building your instruments, preparing your IRB application, working with your data, and writing up. It works within your method, and it keeps the boundary of your data in your hands. Each section below is marked with the plan it starts at.
Question to findings, in one place.
Design the study
Shape the research question, build instruments, prepare the IRB application.
Transcribe
Audio to text runs locally, with speaker turns, formatted and ready to code.
Code and interpret
You code as you read. Sotto suggests recurring themes for you to review.
Defend the method
Saturation, inter-rater reliability, a reflexivity journal, Socratic questioning.
Write it up
Draft findings from your own coded passages, with citations in APA, MLA or Chicago.
Your sources, organized.
Keep the sources and citations behind your study in one place, alongside the data they inform.
Start before the data.
Develop your research question with methodology support, then build the instruments to answer it. Import an existing interview guide or questionnaire from CSV, Qualtrics, or Word, and refine it in place.
Prepare your IRB application where your data already lives.
Work through a determination questionnaire that explains which review pathway fits your study and why, then draft each section with guidance as you go. Export the finished application as a text or Word file. Like the rest of Sotto, it runs in your environment, so your protocol and participant details stay with you.
Recordings become coding-ready text.
Audio-to-text runs locally, so your interview recordings are transcribed with speaker turns, formatted, and ready to work with. Already have a clean transcript? Upload it directly and skip the transcription step. Participant data is analyzed on-device.
Find the patterns across your data.
You code segments as you read. From your accepted codes, Sotto suggests recurring themes for you to review, and shows how a code spreads across participants. It works within grounded theory, thematic analysis, and phenomenological approaches rather than forcing one of its own.
Built for a method you will have to defend.
Track saturation across participants, compare coding in a participant-by-domain matrix, run inter-rater reliability sessions, and keep committee comments beside the work. Keep a reflexivity journal as your thinking develops, and let the Socratic Challenger question your interpretations from different methodological stances. After a session, Sotto also prompts you with questions to scaffold a reflective memo, which you write while the thinking is fresh.
From analysis to a written draft.
Move from coded data toward a written draft. Writing assistance is the point where you decide what, if anything, goes to an AI model. Sotto shows you the exact text it would send, lets you edit it first, and nothing leaves your computer until you approve it. Export your library as an RIS file for Zotero or Mendeley, and format citations in APA 7th, MLA 9th, or Chicago 17th (Author-Date).
The numbers, in the same environment.
Datasets, statistics, visualizations, and an integration matrix that links your qualitative themes to your quantitative results. This is in active development and is not part of the first release. It is planned for Sotto Solo.
The method, not just the answer.
Sotto tracks saturation as you code, so you can see when new interviews stop producing new codes, and defend the point at which you stopped collecting. Every chart carries its number, and none of them needs a participant's words on screen.
The boundary stays with you.
Whether you run Sotto on your own machine or in a private instance you provision, your research data stays in an environment only you can access. Analysis runs on a local model, and you decide what, if anything, reaches an outside AI model. Back up an entire project as an encrypted file, and carry it between machines with export and import.
Start free. Move up when the work does.
Sotto Stacks needs no payment card and uses the same installer as every paid plan, so you can find out whether Sotto runs on your computer before you pay.