Castor EDC Pricing

We are a small start-up company and the task of setting up our study fell on me, a person with absolutely no experience with EDC systems. After doing a little research we selected Castor EDC because it seemed easy to use and the price was right for us. Castor EDC has been everything we've hoped it would be. It is easy to learn and set-up. Our study sites have liked it and found it very easy to use....

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I have two fairly nit picky issues: 1. Setting up user rights is a bit clunky. It is very flexible, which I love, but a bit clunky. 2. Dependencies and validations are limited to a single field and the logic is very limited. On the plus side, one can work around those limitations with hidden calculations.

Hi Bill, Thank you so much for you review. We are very happy to be able to help your business with such an important element of your journey towards getting Alibrex to market. I will be in touch soon for a personal introduction. Please know, while not immediate, we do plan to redesign the validation and dependency builder. In the mean time, as you mentioned, multi-variate edit checks and dependencies can be scripted using calculation fields. Derk Arts, MD PhD CEO Castor EDC

Being a small non-profit organization stretched for time and resources, finding a secure platform which took into account our small under-resourced status in cost and was easy for me to build and customize was invaluable. Add to that the amazing customer service and I was even happier.

There are 3 things that could be improved: 1. Allowing for more than one dependency on a question. 2. Make automations easier to set up with clearer terminology and instructions. 3. Allow for simple pulling of numbers for a specific field without exporting data (i.e. how many in field x said 'yes')

Castor is a GDPR compliant tool to capture and store baseline characteristics, patient surveys, and clinical outcomes. It's affordable, easy to set up and easy to use. What I love most about it is that it improves the study quality so much compared to traditional methods of data capturing. I also love all the automatic calculations (e.g. age from date of birth and procedure date) the system can perform. The ePro feature to send out surveys to patients directly is great!

The platform could be even better if it offered functionality to design/structure all variables, definitions, input value options, and calculations in Excel and upload it to Castor. This would make it so much easier to translate (parts) of existing databases to new projects. Also, I missed an option to directly export the database to STATA. Castor currently only supports CSV/Excel/SPSS. Otherwise, no cons.

Hi Sjors, Thank you for your positive review! It's good to hear that you have used Castor for so many multicenter studies and that all users were happy with the platform. We hope you conduct many more successful studies in the future! We actually have an internal method to transform existing 'Excel' databases into Castor and we do offer such transformations. Please get in touch and we can lead you through the process! Best regards, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

This software is intuitive to use. The company provides video training with all the ins and outs, even though you can work with it without the training. In the past, I had issues with obtaining a calculation for a specific formula and the customer support was so helpful, truly. Responses were almost immediate and my issue was resolved. In addition, the use of records and reports are so helpful when building the CRFs. This product includes EVERYTHING you can find in all of the competing products, including the regulatory requirements, but is so much less expensive that it is not even worth checking out the other companies. This is my go to platform for all of my clients' clinical trials.

Watching the videos... I just want to hop in. I am writing this because I have to, honestly, there is nothing I don't like about this software.

Hi Sharon, Thank you so much for this super positive review and great to have you as a loyal customer! Our goal is to offer a product that covers all features necessary for any medical device or pharma study at a competitive price - so it's good to hear that it has indeed met your company's needs. Best regards, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

It's really easy setting up the data collection process for your study. I love how you can play around with setting up a study (test study) so you can learn and implement that best data collection process for your study. The customization is great. It's also a great tool for small companies because of the price! Castor also does not charge you until your study goes live, which takes a lot of pressure off of the set up time, which is ultimately the longest and most difficult part when getting started with an EDC system--this gives you time to review with your team.

I wish there was a "save select data export" feature, where you can customize specific data fields to export, save, and re-download them at a later time instead of manually having to customize the fields again. The tutorial/help videos for setting up the study were mostly helpful, but I didn't use many features because of the lack of clarity in how to implement or the purpose of certain data fields. I think a better explanation (or even examples) as to what a "Repeated Measures" function as opposed to a "Add Report" function, for example.

We literally have found tons of uses for Castor. The ability to build your own forms quickly and knowing the data is stored in a GDPR Compliant way is a HUGE help for us. Also the validation options in the fields are really good / ensure high level of data quality. And Also, The SPSS export function is really a great help too!

The Surveys do not work well on Mobile phones and most of our research participants would use them that way.

Hi Mike, Great to hear that you have found so many uses of Castor and that you rate it with 5 stars on all aspects! Compliance and security, together with a helpful support team our some of our top priorities! There have been some small improvements in the survey mobile experience, but we are aiming for a full mobile optimization with our coming redesigns. Stay tuned! :) Best, Elena

- Ease of Programming. I don't have any programming experience, but I was able to build out the whole EDC database by myself, just watching the tutorial videos and explanations on the Castor website. - Responsive Support. Mainly interacted with Customer Support leads, but as a whole was impressed that the support team took our issues seriously and followed through to conclusion. - Low Price. Honestly, likely too low of a price for the value. Others in the field are something like 10x what you are charging, or far more. - User Interface. I like the changes made recently. Really opens up the screen.

- Loading Time. This may be down to how I organized my Study with lots of repeated measures and a long architecture. But it takes a good 30-60 seconds to load up an individual Subject, and then 10 seconds or so to switch fields sometimes, most notably when I'm trying to dig through Reports. - Single Dependencies. Likely it would overcomplicate the programming, but being able to have more than 1 Dependency for an item would be useful. Only in a small percentage of cases, so the vast majority a single Dependency was sufficient. A like-to-have, not a need-to-have.

What I like about Castor is that I can create a user-friendly database that will also create a user-friendly output, i.e. that I can already prepare the data as much as possible to make data analysis easier.

More possibilities regarding surveys would add even more value: automatic reminders to subjects to complete their survey, notifications if surveys have not been completed yet (in addition to the existing notifications that surveys have been completed).

Hi Brechtje, Thank you for this review! We are working on automatic reminders, something that's been on the top of our list! Notifications for non-completion will be a next step afterwards. Good luck further with your research in Castor! Best, Elena

Easy data download process, great interface, and very affordable compared to the other EDC systems out there.

There are still some minor bugs that the developers are fixing. Downloading large sets of data can be a bit slow and also delayed.

Hi Arick, Thank you very much for your positive review! User friendliness and customer support are our main focus points, so thank you for mentioning them. We wish you many successful studies in the future and please continue reporting bugs that you encounter :-) Best, Elena

Easy to use Fantastic customer service Affordable

On rare occasions, bit of a lag time moving from one page to next while filling in form. Nothing major.

Dear Shardule, It's always a pleasure to see a 5-star review! Thank you for the nice words! If you do experience lags again (definitely not the intention!), please contact our customer support, we can look together with you to see what might be causing it. As you know, we want to solve any issues you encounter! :) Thanks again, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

Very easy and user friendly to set up with a great support team. Much more affordable than previous databases we have used.

Nothing- I really can't fault it. Highly recommend

It is easy to deploy, a quite friendly user system, allows quick study setup and is not expensive at all.

The audit trail difficult to extract and get. I had some issues when designing a page with a big table: performance issues led to problems when recording data. Keep in mind to design pages without hundreds of fields.

Easy to use, no Knowledge on programming needed, not too expensive

Some Tools ae missing for my Purpose e.g. multimedial integration

easy to build up your project with. The structure helps you think about your statistical plan.

expensive compared to redcap, but still value for money

Dear Olivia, Thank you for your review! Being the best solution for your data management is what we aim for! We also aim to keep our prices as low as possible for the provided quality, especially for academic research studies, and we trust that the value exceeds the price :) Thank you for using Castor and we hope to be in touch again for your future studies! Best regards, Elena Kochova, MD Customer Success Manager

easy to use, good quality, easy acces and good value

Nothing specifically, so far no problems with the software have occured

Thanks for the review Jony! We really appreciate it. We currently have an experienced designer/UX team working on the Ease of Use of our platform. 4 stars is great, but we are definitely going for 5! So stay tuned :) Derk Arts, MD PhD CEO Castor EDC

Very easy to use Lots of possibillities Very cheap compared to other electronic data storing programs

That if you add a calculation later on you have to open all the records seperately before the calculation has run.

It's easy to set up and customize simple structures studies. It offers a wide variety of tools to validate data entry. It's cost-effective and the fact that one can practice and customize and test before the "go live" is a great advantage. Great web tutorials.

More complex study data structures require Java programming knowledge. Some of the widgets are not flexible enough, especially the table structure. The mobile support is not there yet.

- easy to master - no unnecessary fuss - easy to manage - good value for money - fast browsing experience

- the layout is fixed - for advanced users, there is no accessibility to more powerfull programming to manipulate the platform. - the image/file upload feature is very restricted in file size

The ability to easily build/test/change your own databases is one of the best things about this software. Their technical support library and staff also make it very easy to learn how the system works.

Being simpler software means that Castor doesn't have all the bells and whistles that might be available in far more expensive software packages but this is more than made up for by its cost effectiveness and the ability for users to run their own databases.

customer service, the user end, easy exporting options

building the CRF, copying steps takes long and isn't intuitive. you can't drug / duplicate as easily as other softwares. repeated measures are uncomfortable to access in the record and unless i export it , i can't easily see all the measures with visit numbers and dates. in general i think CRF building is a bit to technical and maybe made more for a computer guy than a CRO company.

Impressive flexibility, ability customize forms with (almost) any imaginable feature/data flow.

Creating the forms is time intensive, and pages take longer than desired to load.

HI Elena, Thank you for your review and for pointing out the system's flexibility and our customer support :-) It's unfortunate to hear that the form building seems time intensive - we would like to hear more about your experience since our aim is in fact to reduce the time spent on creating forms! Also, page loading should be seamless, so if you are running into issues with that there could be an underlying problem - please contact us if you run into it again so we can have a look. Thanks again, Elena

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Thank you Paul, it's always a pleasure to work with you and your department!

Its user friendliness. They company has introduction videos to help you get started. You will be able to quickly set up your data system, which you can easily share with other members of your research team. Costumer service is very helpful. And pricing is cheap.

It took some time to get used to the structure of Castor. So some initial effort is required to get started.

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Hi Petra, Awesome that you mention the difference with paper. We feel eCRFs definitely are the future! Thanks for reviewing! - Derk Arts MD, PhD.c, CEO