Liminon

Use case

Qualitative analysis software for a dissertation built on interviews

You have twenty or thirty recorded interviews, one laptop and a committee that will ask how you analyzed them. Here is how Liminon fits that work, and where it does not.

Liminon Team · Published 2026-10-13 · Updated 2026-10-13 · 5 min read

Who this is for

Doctoral and master's students whose thesis rests on interviews: ten to forty recordings, a single laptop, and a review board and committee that will read your methods chapter closely. If your department already gives you NVivo or MAXQDA, keep using it. This page is for the case where it does not, or where your protocol keeps participant recordings off third-party servers.

What the work actually involves

  1. Getting from recordings to transcripts you can trust.
  2. Coding them, and keeping a codebook that does not drift.
  3. Writing memos as you go, then turning codes into findings tied to your research questions.
  4. Showing a committee, and later a reviewer, exactly how you got from quotes to claims.

How Liminon maps onto it

  • Transcription and speaker separation run on your Mac. Drop in audio or video (.mp4 and .mov import directly); the first time you transcribe, Liminon asks how many people speak so the speaker separation has a hint, and “Not sure” lets it decide.
  • Coding works on whole segments or on any selected phrase. Codes nest into trees, can be merged later, and one view pulls every quote for a code.
  • Memos and Research Questions sit in the same project. Findings link back to the exact coded quotes, and each quote jumps to its place in the transcript.
  • Case Comparison shows, for a finding or a research question, what each interview contributed.
  • Reports & Exports produce transcripts, the codebook, matrices as an Excel workbook (code by recording, code by speaker), a quotation table as a Word document, and a methodology report as Word and PDF that includes your audit trail. A one-click research package zips all of it for a committee or co-author.
  • AI assistance is optional. Code suggestions and theme discovery use a small local model through Ollama. Every suggestion stays pending until you accept it, and each accept, reject and edit is recorded, so your methods chapter can say honestly what the AI did.

For the coding method itself, see our starter guide to qualitative coding.

What it costs a student

Liminon is free during the beta. The permanent license is a one-time purchase, not a subscription: $79 for students with an academic email address (standard $179, early-bird $129), with updates through v1.x. A dissertation runs for years, so a price that does not renew matters. Prices are on the pricing page.

What it does not do

  • It runs only on Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14 or later.
  • It cannot import NVivo or ATLAS.ti projects yet. REFI-QDA (QDPX) import is on the roadmap, not in this build.
  • There is no cloud sync or live multi-user editing by design. A project is a .qproj folder you back up or hand to a co-author.
  • English-language interviews work best. Other languages transcribe, but AI coding quality varies and speaker separation on multi-speaker non-English recordings is still being measured.
  • The first transcription downloads the transcription models once (a few GB). After that it works offline.

A note on ethics review

Running on your own Mac removes the question of whether a vendor's cloud saw your recordings. It does not replace your review board's judgment, so ask your board what it requires; our checklist for IRB-compliant transcription lists what to ask.

Try Liminon free during the beta

Transcribe, code, and analyze interviews on your Mac.

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon (M1 or later) · Free during beta

Download the free beta