Compare
AntConc vs Voyant Tools
Both are free text analysis tools for corpus exploration; AntConc runs offline as desktop software, Voyant Tools runs in the browser with linked visual views.
Side by side
| AntConc | Voyant Tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Laurence Anthony (Waseda University) | Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell (academic project) |
| Pricing model | Free | Open source + paid options |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment | Self-hosted | Cloud, Self-hosted |
| Open source | No | Yes (GPL-3.0) |
| Best for | Corpus linguists and text-mining students needing fast, offline concordance and frequency analysis. | Humanities students and researchers wanting quick, no-code exploratory text analysis of a corpus. |
| Pricing | Free standalone desktop software with no paid tier. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. | Free to use in-browser; maintained as an academic open-source project. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. |
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Verdict
AntConc and Voyant Tools both do text analytics work — word frequency, concordance, keyword-in-context — on a corpus with no coding and no cost. They differ in where they run and how they present results. AntConc is a standalone desktop application that works entirely offline on files you supply, with no server, account or upload step; that makes it well suited to sensitive or unpublished text collections. Voyant Tools runs in the browser as a linked set of visual and tabular panels — a word cloud, a concordance, a trends graph and a document reader all updating together as you filter — and processes text client-side, so uploaded text is not sent to a server for storage, though it is a cloud tool by default rather than an offline install (it can also be self-hosted).
Choose AntConc if
- You want to work entirely offline on files you control, with nothing uploaded anywhere.
- You need collocation statistics, keyword-list comparison against a reference corpus, and lexical-bundle analysis specifically — Voyant's toolset does not cover these the same way.
- You are teaching or learning corpus linguistics methods where AntConc is the long-established standard.
Choose Voyant Tools if
- You want an immediate, visual, linked-panel view of a corpus rather than a more traditional concordancer interface.
- You would rather not install desktop software, or need to demo or teach from any browser without setup.
- Your source is a URL or a mix of file formats (plain text, HTML, PDF) rather than clean plain-text files.
What they share
Both are entirely free with no paid tier, both are widely used in introductory digital-humanities and corpus-linguistics teaching, and both are aimed at researchers who want to explore a corpus without writing code. Neither replaces a dedicated network-analysis tool like Gephi if your real question is about relationships between entities rather than word patterns within text.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026