Accordance, Logos and eSword

So I recently decided to evalute some software for use with my studies and it came down to a choice. The choice was between Accordance, Logos and eSword.

So, I don’t really enjoy the choice that comes with birthdays – generally I just get what I need when I want it (after discussing it with my wife if the cost is higher than incidental spending). Given that my birthday is soon, my beautiful wife asked me what I would like. Now I used to be a bit of a gamer, but my life is just a bit too busy these days for that frivolity. Nevertheless, my graphics card on my PC has gone from fairly solid a few years ago to, well not. Then I have been having trouble with my primary HDD and I thought I could get a new SSD Drive to use as my primary Windows drive. Then I thought, I do a lot of study, and perhaps a new bible software package would assist me in my study. So yesterday, after a heap of research, I finally made my choice.

Let’s run though my choices. I have eSword and it’s been pretty good but it’s a bit dated and I wanted something a bit more shiny. So I had a chat with the guys at one of the Uni’s I attend and they were a bit mixed in their recommendations but it boiled down to Accordance, Logos and eSword with one wild card – StepBible which I admit I didn’t really look too closely at.

eSword

eSword is free (though they do ask for donations), has a simple interface and works fine. As a beginner, you just can’t go past it. I have nothing against it. It works on various platforms and I have it on my PC, my Laptop and my phone. The library is adequate and the features seem pretty good for what it is. I would have been happy to keep using it if I didn’t have an opportunity to buy one of the others.

Logos

Logos is not free (though it seems to have a free version). It has a number of “vocational” and “denominational” libraries and you can buy various categories within the denominational and vocational libraries including starter packages all the way up to a portfolio library and the pricing reflects what you are buying. In Feb 2025, the portfolio library for a researcher contains nearly 3000 books for just over $3,300 (USD). You can buy individual books as well. One weird omission in the researcher package bibles seemed to be the ESV, my preferred translation. I may have missed it, but it didn’t seem to be there and I think that was the final reason that I decided against the software.

Other factors based on the opinions of others was the ease of use with some saying that it is harder to use. Accordance according to my friends is easier to use and better for people studying Greek and Hebrew (which I will be in the next year or so). All of this is pretty subjective and you really need to look closely at each package for yourself.

Logos offers a 30% student discount as does Accordance but for Logos this is only available on an annual +2-year subscription. Not quite sure what that means, but a subscription being by its nature a rolling fee structure, I am not probably that fond of.

Accordance

So I went with Accordance. Did I make the right decision? I frankly don’t know. There were a lot of packages and it was really confusing to work out. I reached out to customer service and found that there is no real way to directly compare all of the various packages, though you can compare some of them in their collections comparison tab.

I tried to compare collections by using this tab and then having a look at other collections they offer (eg Blue Collection) but short of getting forensic, I really couldn’t do a detailed analysis of what was offered. Frankly, I just ended up looking at the Greek and Hebrew collection, thinking about what was offered and well, clicking buy. My package was the Greek and Hebrew Discoverer Collection.

Currency

My frustration was that there is no indicator as to the currency being used. Many websites localise things like currency based on where you are browsing from or at least make it clear that the currency is USD or AUD or whatever. None of this is clearly demarked. If you are offering something globally, surely you want to help out your customer base? As always, US centric – I’ll get off my hobby horse now!

I purchased the software, applied my student discount of 30% (which is pretty good!) and downloaded and installed it. It is a pretty steep learning curve as you would expect with such a full featured product.

Tutorials

There is a tutorials tab in the software and I am about halfway through the easy tutorials. They are quite good, but (and here’s another gripe) one of the tutorials is about accessing, copying and pasting text (including citations in SBL though sans date for some reason – or maybe I don’t know how to use the software well enough for that yet!). For some reason, they use Eerdmans Dictionary as the text to paste from in the tutorial and at least in my package, this product doesn’t exist!!! It means that the tutorial attempts to open the product and give you directions based on a text you don’t own and isn’t in the software! The software crashed a couple of times because it couldn’t access it. Ultimately, I actuallly spent the $30USD (don’t forget USD) because I think its a useful text and the finally the software behaved.

Anyway, I have only had it a day and it seems to work fine now and appears pretty useful. The package I bought cost $449USD which after discount and our abysmal currency conversion ended up costing a total of $497AUD. I’ll build my library over time – I’m committed now.

This probably wasn’t that useful, just a bit of a ramble, but hopefully you found it a little interesting and maybe informative.

Just to be very clear once again, I did not get any incentive from anyone to write this. The only incentive I got was 30% off based on being a student!