Here's the backstory: Matrix Requirements, a QMS software company, got sold to a private equity fund in around 2024 (which I wrote about here). Shortly later, they more-or-less followed the "private equity playbook" of simply raising their pricing to increase revenue. Notably, they even raised prices for existing customers, making quite a few customers lose trust and migrating away.

So now, understandably, medical device companies are looking for Matrix Requirements alternatives, given that they might perceive their once-loved QMS software now as a less trustworthy supplier.

I like to rant a lot about the eQMS industry and its shady business practices (case in point: Matrix Requirements raising prices for existing customers), but credit where credit is due: I think the Matrix software is one of the most customizable eQMS software packages out there. Yes, it's even more customizable than our eQMS software which I usually describe as some sort of magical unicorn software which does everything. So yeah, our software is of course better and we're not shady, etc., etc., but Matrix wins in one aspect: Customization. That's a bit of a double-edged sword, as we'll see, but the point still stands.

In Matrix, you can pretty much create any sort of "entity" you like. So, for example, when tracking software requirements, you could say "hey, it's not enough that a software requirement only has a title and a description - I also want to upload a funny dog picture alongside with every software requirement!" - and, regardless of whether that's a sane idea or not, you could add a field named "dog_picture" to your software requirements in Matrix.

We generally strongly caution against customizing your eQMS software in this way as it leads to an epic mess in the mid-term future (and makes it harder to migrate away, as we will see), but yeah, if you want customization, Matrix is probably the way to go.

So that sets the stage for our search for Matrix Requirements alternatives: Depending on how deeply you've customized your "entities" in Matrix, migrating away is either going to be easy or brutally hard. Also, some software, in my opinion, is completely unsuitable as it doesn't support any customization, so you won't be able to migrate there.

We can roughly separate the alternatives into these groups:

The first category is "unsuitable software" when you're looking for a Matrix alternative. This list includes the usual enterprise eQMS software suspects:

No you might be surprised - why are all of these unsuitable? Simple answer: Because their level of customization is way lower than that of Matrix. If you look at Greenlight Guru and Qualio, for example, you'll notice that their software requirements items (example from above) don't really support custom properties (dog pictures!) as we noted above.

So you're tied into a very rigid data model.

Now, you could argue that you could overcome that rigidity if you either 1) haven't customized Matrix very much so far (well done!) or 2) are willing to change up your data model during your migration and adapt it to the target software.

Those would be valid approaches, but then the big question would be: Why migrate in the first place? Companies we've talked to want to migrate away from Matrix due to the (now) high price, and all of the providers above are also well known for their high prices. So your #1 reason for migrating just went out of the window.

So, in short - yes, you could migrate, it'll likely be painful, and there's no benefit if price was your primary motivation.

The next category is "suitable software", where a migration might be possible and makes sense.

As you've already noticed, I'm hugely biased because I saw the broken eQMS software back in the stone age (2020) and decided to do something about it - that's when I built OpenRegulatory (this website!), and our eQMS software, Formwork.

Now, I won't say that Formwork is universally great, especially for people migrating from Matrix. Yes, we've actually migrated multiple (!) Matrix customer to Formwork in the meantime (we offer a free, "white-globe" migration service!), but there are some benefits and drawbacks.

The biggest drawback is the one I mentioned above when comparing Matrix to other eQMS software - Formwork also doesn't allow "custom properties", so no, you also can't attach funny dog pictures to your software requirements here. So you'll either need to adapt your data model during migration or hope that your Matrix data model was so un-customized that it easily fits into the Formwork data model.

We've learned that this is actually doable, as we've already successfully migrated multiple Matrix customers to Formwork.

Data models aside, the biggest point in favor of Formwork is simply price: The highest Formwork pricing tier comes in at only 499€ / month, with unlimited user seats. When we tell this to Matrix customers, they usually rub their eyes and respond like "hold on, 499€ per seat? or 499€ for unlimited seats?" - and, indeed, 499€ / month is our flat price which includes unlimited seats.

So, based on our last research on Matrix Requirements pricing, for a company with 20 seats, that's at least 75% in cost savings, as the Matrix package for 20 seats clocks in at an astounding 2.2k€ / month!

So, in short - give Formwork a try. You're in good company, as you're not the first Matrix customer coming here.

What other options do you have?

Here's another wild option which probably makes me a terrible salesperson: You could just build your own eQMS software. Nowadays with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, it's feasible to build stuff on your own. For eQMS software, it's still a bit of an uphill battle as you'll spend quite a lot of time squashing bugs and specially building documentation to show auditors that your custom eQMS software is actually safe, but it's doable.

I'm suggesting this because I've seen a few Matrix customers who, let's just say, have gone a bit crazy in their Matrix customizations. So they've started creating data models which are so complex that they're essentially locked in for life in Matrix, because no other software could really replicate this sort of complexity (and, personally, I think that's a really bad situation to be in, that's why you have to try to keep your regulatory documentation as simple as possible).

For these people. the only viable migration path might be to extract specific Matrix features to their own, custom-made software. For example software requirements: It's quite viable to build your own software requirements management system. A friend of mine (tm) once built such a system internally at a company, it was based on the Django Admin UI of all things, it worked well and auditors accepted it.

That's what you could do, too.

But then of course, that kicks off the whole discussion whether you want to spend your engineering hours (or tokens) on building eQMS software instead of building your product. Probably not. So yeah. Give Formwork a try, we're happy to help you migrate!