Dear Readers,
I am writing this to share something I have been quietly building for the past few months.
Today I shipped NAVAL·SEM v1.0 LTS — free, open-source software for Structural Equation Modelling. Free to download, free to use, free to cite in a methods section. No license fee. No subscription. No asking around.
Why this exists
It started with a message I saw in a research WhatsApp group. Someone was asking, at well past midnight, if anyone had a spare SmartPLS license key. Not urgently. Just quietly asking.
I have seen that kind of message before. PhD students on stipends. Researchers at institutions that cannot afford the licensing fees for professional SEM tools. The software they need to do their dissertations costs what a month's salary costs. So they ask around, and hope someone replies.
I scrolled past. But I did not forget.
The question that kept returning was simple: if a free, rigorous, citable SEM tool existed, would those people have needed to ask? The answer was no. So I set about building one.
What NAVAL·SEM does
NAVAL·SEM covers the full workflow of modern structural equation modelling research. It does PLS-SEM and CB-SEM with bootstrapped significance testing, HTMT, AVE, composite reliability, and the Fornell-Larcker criterion. In v1.0, it also adds fsQCA — fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis with Quine-McCluskey Boolean minimisation — which rounds out the most common methodological toolkit in management and social science research.
There is a visual drag-and-drop model builder that generates lavaan syntax automatically, which means researchers who are not comfortable working from a command line can still do serious analysis. There is also a one-click APA 7th edition Word export — submission-ready measurement model tables, discriminant validity, structural model, and indirect effects, formatted to journal standards.
The release also includes moderation and mediation analysis (equivalent to Hayes PROCESS Models 7, 14 and 58/59), multi-group analysis with MICOM measurement invariance, FIMIX-PLS segmentation, Necessary Condition Analysis, Importance-Performance Map Analysis, and content validity indices.
174 tests pass in the release gate. 21 API endpoints are available for those who prefer to script their analysis.
How to get it
The software runs as a Windows desktop application and is available as an installer on SourceForge — no Python installation required. It is also listed on the Microsoft Store, which matters for researchers on managed university machines who cannot install software without administrator rights. Every release is archived on Zenodo with a citable DOI, so it can be properly referenced in a methods section.
https://naval-sem.sourceforge.io
A personal note
This was built alone, on a broken laptop. The fan runs too loud. There is a key that only registers when pressed at a particular angle. The screen flickers during heavy computation — exactly the kind that takes the longest to debug. I learned to save before every test run.
Nobody donated. The project got forked, which tells you something about perceived value, but the forks did not come with pull requests or fixes or even a kind word in the issues. The only way through that is to keep building until the work is undeniable. Not louder — just more thorough. Each release that shipped. Each test that passed. Each validated anchor value.
The laptop is still broken. The software is not.
If you know a researcher who has been quietly asking around for a license key, please share the link with them.
Yours sincerely,
N. Singh
P.S. — NAVAL·SEM is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The GitHub repository is at github.com/navalsingh9/naval-sem.
