Castor EDC vs OpenClinica Comparison

Highly cost effective for small firms; company's focus on developing a robust, competitive SaaS solution for clinical data management; Company's dedication to enhancements based on company's evolving needs.

ePRO module has some limitations related to its effective use for patient diaries.

Thank you for the great review John! We also appreciate your candor on Participate and we continue to enhance the functionality on that module. We would love to hear your thoughts on making Participate more effective for diaries. Axogen has been a fantastic client and we love working with you folks. All the best! Your friends at OpenClinica

OpenClinica is a system which is very easy to use - for the basic use you can simply start with the designer and create EDC. The system is not overloaded with information and therefore user-friendly. I use this program every day in my projects and my clients also praise this system very much - after a short training they are able to start using it. I really appreciate that the system allows for many possibilities to design CRFs. A super useful thing are also the ePROs and ruls option.

I hope new guideline version will be more detailed - the one which is available is very general

Thank you for the wonderful review, Malgorzata. We continue to work on the OpenClinica Documentation and Training site to add greater detail and organization.

Having worked with OpenClinica and other EDC systems for several years, OpenClinica puts all the others to shame when it comes to customer service; their team bends over backward to help train, explain and fix. The software is continually improving based on user feedback. The forms are very powerful and have almost every feature you might need: conditional display, modern responsive interface, touch friendly, lots of question types, conditional requirement, programmable notes to users. The new version (OC4) is considerably easier to develop than OC3: no coding required, if you can write Excel functions then you can use even the moved advanced features. SDTM compatible examples of the most common OpenClinica eCRFs are readily available. It's much cheaper than alternatives and has some features that I have only seen on the most high end products: question libraries, one-click deployment, advanced user inputs (eg drawings, VAS), localisation features, customisable ID generation etc.

The older version (OC3) requires coding experience to make the nost of it. I recommend avoiding OC3 and using OC4 instead.

Thank you for your review Andrew. It's great to hear from a seasoned data manager. We appreciate your acknowledgment of our team's diligent work toward greater usability and capability.

I have had a great experience using OpenClinica EDC during the last 3 years with several studies (Observational studies, Registries and Clinical Trials). It´s a web based solution to build and manage multi-sites clinical studies. It´s a powerful platform, great user support, Data Entry and DM capabilities makes everything simple. The study build and CRF designer allows re-use across studies. Updates and amendments are a simple process. Audit trail is excellent and easy to track and data extractions are available in several formats whenever is needed for the statistician. Data management capabilities improves data quality and productive monitoring. Most CRAs were pleased with the system. OpenClinica offers Cloud Services. No need IT skills for installation and setup. Super User Training is very helpful for data managers when building CRFs. If regulatory submission is required, the Regulatory Support Package service is highly recommended.

Programmer skills are needed to implement complex validations during CRF design. Complex reports should be customized in Excel after data extract.

The study build is straightforward, validation/derivation procedures were a breeze to create, and data extractions easy to set up and quickly provide to my statistician. Mid-study updates/amendments were a simple process and the audit trail versioning was excellent and easy to track. There is a learning curve for the novice data manager when building CRFs. But after the first few CRFs build from scratch, it became very easy. Also the training program I took was very good (1 week face-to face-class). I was comfortable building studies on my own within a couple of weeks of taking the class. The online user community was extremely helpful and a great resource. As I was the only DM for some time, the site/user administration was easy to manage. As I performed all end user training, most CRAs & CRCs were pleased with the system's ease of use for the end user. I built ~13 production studies and these functioned well as traditional EDC as well as in-house double DE databases. I found the query email function was a very helpful tool. Customer support (using Enterprise Edition) was second to none. My questions were usually addressed within a few hours after submitting the ticket. Any unexpected issues were addressed and usually corrected that same day.

The data load process was a bit challenging. I would recommend an easier method for non-programmers to perform this task. For complex types of reports, additional tools are needed as the included extracts can be a bit cumbersome to join (depending on the report) however I was able to utilize Excel for the majority of the reporting tasks I performed.