The eQMS industry is a weird industry. On its surface, eQMS software is not very complex - at the end of the day, what you get is a "Google Drive with compliance features baked in". None of this is particularly hard to build. But, somewhat surprisingly, there are some very entrenched companies, and MasterControl is one of them. And, boy, is their pricing crazy.
MasterControl Pricing: $25k+ / year
Based on our research, MasterControl pricing starts at around $25k / year, and quickly scales upwards towards $100k / year - so that translates to $2k - $8k / month. For an eQMS software which looks like Google Drive. Crazy!
Note that the official MasterControl pricing page contains none of these figures, so prospective customers are left to piece together various pricing reports which can be found on Capterra, SelectHub and all the other semi-shady "enterprise software comparison" websites (this is a weird industry).
Anyway, moving forward..
Features
The MasterControl eQMS product can be roughly separated into three distinct parts:
Note that the official MasterControl pricing page contains none of these figures, so prospective customers are left to piece together various pricing reports which can be found on Capterra, SelectHub and all the other semi-shady "enterprise software comparison" websites (this is a weird industry).
Anyway, moving forward..
Features
The MasterControl eQMS product can be roughly separated into three distinct parts:
- Quality
- Manufacturing
- "Asset" (?)
In the unlikely case that you can still follow: The sum of these 3 parts is called the "ADAPT Platform" (??). In addition to this, the product also offers "Operations", "Security" and "Cloud" (???) features.
Still with me?
It gets better: There's a "data platform" (probably marketing speak for "SQL database") and, to capture the modern sentiment of people searching for AI features, there's an "agentic AI platform".
Hidden Costs In MasterControl
Validation Report
While we don't have first-hand information for this, it's quite likely that the $25k / year mentioned earlier are only a baseline, because enterprise software like MasterControl tends to contain all sorts of additional upsells, some of which are optional, some of which are not.
Most importantly, for eQMS software, you typically want to receive something called a "Validation Report" from the provider, which you can show to your auditors to prove that you've "validated" the software for the purpose of providing eQMS features to your company.
Usually, eQMS software providers give their customers this report (we do so for free!), but many enterprise vendors tend to charge extra for this. This is beyond ridiculous, because creating such a report is not a lot of work - but providers like to argue otherwise by saying "it took us hundreds of person-hours to create this crappy Word document!".
It's quite likely that MasterControl charges an additional fee for their validation report, and our estimate would be that it's a four-figure dollar sum.
Onboarding
Similar to the validation report, we've heard of enterprise eQMS providers like MasterControl forcing their customers to pay a one-off "setup" or "onboarding" fee.
It's not really clear what sort of value this contains as the service provided here usually consists of simply copy-pasting some QMS templates for your account (we've seen Qualio do this, for example), but the biggest point (or problem) is that customers can not opt out of this.
We estimate this to be another four-figure dollar sum, and it's likely not optional.
While we don't have first-hand information for this, it's quite likely that the $25k / year mentioned earlier are only a baseline, because enterprise software like MasterControl tends to contain all sorts of additional upsells, some of which are optional, some of which are not.
Most importantly, for eQMS software, you typically want to receive something called a "Validation Report" from the provider, which you can show to your auditors to prove that you've "validated" the software for the purpose of providing eQMS features to your company.
Usually, eQMS software providers give their customers this report (we do so for free!), but many enterprise vendors tend to charge extra for this. This is beyond ridiculous, because creating such a report is not a lot of work - but providers like to argue otherwise by saying "it took us hundreds of person-hours to create this crappy Word document!".
It's quite likely that MasterControl charges an additional fee for their validation report, and our estimate would be that it's a four-figure dollar sum.
Onboarding
Similar to the validation report, we've heard of enterprise eQMS providers like MasterControl forcing their customers to pay a one-off "setup" or "onboarding" fee.
It's not really clear what sort of value this contains as the service provided here usually consists of simply copy-pasting some QMS templates for your account (we've seen Qualio do this, for example), but the biggest point (or problem) is that customers can not opt out of this.
We estimate this to be another four-figure dollar sum, and it's likely not optional.
Why Does MasterControl Pricing Suck So Much?
Which leaves us with the big question of why MasterControl pricing is so intransparent and terrible. I don't know. The enterprise SaaS landscape is a weird place.
MasterControl might be a good choice for your company if:
MasterControl might be a good choice for your company if:
- You like to sit in endless demo / sales calls without making meaningful progress to actually purchasing a software and getting work done
- You like to purchase products for which no public pricing is available
- You need to show your boss that you've published an enterprise-level eQMS software which looks like Windows 95.
In all other cases, you might want to look at Formwork, which is our eQMS. Oh yeah.. we might be a bit biased here because we're in the eQMS market, too! Companies like MasterControl were the reason that we developed Formwork, because we wanted to build an eQMS which is uniquely suited for lean, founder-led companies. And, best of call, Formwork has transparent pricing, a free validation report (for the 499€ tier), unlimited user accounts (!) and no hidden fees at all!
If you haven't yet, give it a chance. You can cancel Formwork monthly and export your data any time, so there's not much to lose. You can still move to MasterControl later if you prefer to pay more money and experience more pain.
