Card Sorting – Software & Other Downloads

Coming soon: SynCaps V4

Run card sorts online and analyse the results in your browser, on Windows, Mac or anything else. All the SynCaps charts you know, plus group tidying by clicking on the chart and a new significance test that shows whether your participants sorted in materially different ways. Free in early access.

Get SynCaps V4 news »

This page has SynCaps V3, our free Windows software for printing paper card sorts and analysing the results. The download includes the card templates, user guides and sample data.

We also have webinar recordings and videos that you can watch online or download. See card sorting videos.

SynCaps V3 for Windows

SynCaps V3 is a free Windows application for analysing card sorts. Its features include:

Five customizable charts that can be easily incorporated into reports using copy and paste
Expert/reference sort comparisons (to show current IA compared to participant results, for example)
Extensive set of spreadsheet export files for additional analysis and charting
Nested groups - allows participants to build their own hierarchies of groups
Participant analysis and filtering, including participant cluster analysis to determine if separate communities are present
Generation of SPSS scripts for further analysis

All of the features are described in the user guide and release notes included in the download. SynCaps V3 is free for everyone to use, but please consider making a donation to help us maintain and develop it.

We've also produced three one-hour webinars on card sorting:

Part 1: Preparing Paper Sorts
Part 2: Basic Analysis (Paper and Online Sorts)
Part 3: Advanced Analysis (SynCapsV3)

Part 1 covers all versions of SynCaps. Part 2 includes details of nested groups (V3) and Part 3 covers participant analysis and filtering (V3). See our webinars, videos and slideshows page to view or download the recordings.

SynCaps V3 Download

Right-click to download SynCaps V3.5 for Windows 8 and later - including Windows 11

No licence needed: SynCaps V3.5 does not use licence keys. If you have SynCaps V3.4 or earlier installed, please uninstall it and install V3.5 instead.

Release Notes:

V3.5 removes license management
V3.4.2 fixes several important bugs:
- Earlier versions allowed users to start from a .caps3 file, but if they attempted to create new participant filters, the program crashed. Because access is needed to some data structures not present in .caps3 files, SynCapsV3 will now ask if you want to reprocess the original data. Generally, it is best to do research from the original .txt files and use .caps3 files to share results with others.
- Chart images copied to the clipboard were missing a few lines at the bottom. This is now fixed.
- Print and print preview of charts more than one page deep now works correctly.

V3.4 introduces an Items x Groups spreadsheet (.csv) output file. This shows all items in dendrogram-order as rows and all groups as columns. The order of groups is the same as the Items x Groups chart for the default number of item clusters (the average across participants). Cell values are given as percentages.

Release notes for earlier versions are included in the download.

Downloads: The installation includes all of the documents, templates and sample data files you need. There is nothing more to download.

Mac users: SynCaps V3 runs only on Windows. SynCaps V4, coming soon, works in any modern browser, including on a Mac. Get SynCaps V4 news »

Keywords: card sorting, information architecture, menu design, screen design, cluster analysis, caps, syncaps