Here's what I saw when researching SoftComply pricing. Let's just say that their website team might need to put in some work regarding site reliability:
SoftComply: "Error establishing a database connection"
With that out of the way, I re-tried my luck later, when their website was functional again. So let's look at the SoftComply eQMS pricing!
SoftComply eQMS Pricing: Uh, what did you want to buy?
By default, I tend to be quite critical of all eQMS providers because they don't offer any sort of transparent pricing on their websites. This is not true for SoftComply, however - they do offer a "Pricing" tab in their website menu, and you do end up on a pricing page which actually shows you actual numbers in an actual currency (US Dollars?).
That's the good news.
The bad news is that it's extremely confusing: You can select from 9 products in total (!). The actual naming of these products is beyond hilarious as it really leaves you with no clue what the names mean. Take a look:
SoftComply Pricing Selector: Good luck
Here's what we have:
Risk Manager Plus
Information Security Risk Manager (why is this also a "Risk Manager"?)
Document Manager (basic feature of an eQMS - why do you have to purchase this?)
Validation for Confluence (wait, this costs extra, and is billed per year?)
Risk Manager (how is this different from "Risk Manager Plus"?)
SoftComply eQMS (I thought we got an eQMS when we bought "Document Manager"?)
Static Snapshots (???)
Change History (wait, the other packages don't have any change history?)
Validation for Risk Manager Plus (this is not part of the "Validation for Confluence"?).
So while you might initially think that the SoftComply pricing is transparent, because all numbers are on their website, it's not transparent at all because, well.. all numbers are on their website (😂) and you have no idea what those numbers actually mean.
Also note there's way more than 9 prices for 9 products here:
Many products can be purchased on a monthly or annual basis, which changes their pricing.
You have to enter your company size (user seats), which changes the pricing.
You have to select whether you want to purchase the "Cloud" deployment or "Data Center" deployment (wait, the Cloud is not hosted in a data center?), which changes the pricing (sometimes drastically).
Taking all these factors into account, you essentially end up with an infinite space of potential pricing combinations. I recently learned about the analogy of "Hilbert's Hotel" when understanding infinite numbers, and this seems no different. We could call it the "SoftComply Hotel". Crazy.
Realistic SoftComply Pricing
So what's the actual example SoftComply pricing for a small company, e.g. a startup? It's very hard to estimate, but I gave it a try. On their eQMS product site, SoftComply notes that you need the eQMS, Document Manager and Validation for Confluence.
Plugging those three product into the pricing selector (10 users, cloud deployment (no data center!)), I get:
eQMS: $2,400 one-time (?!?)
Document Manager: $47 / month
Validation for Confluence: $50 / month
To make things even more confusing, when you scroll down on the eQMS page, you also get a pricing selector which only mentions the eQMS price ($2,400 one-time). So.. hold on, do you need the Document Manager and Validation now, or not? More mysteries.
But the biggest mystery here is the actual pricing structure: You're looking at a huge upfront price of $2.4k, with surprisingly low monthly prices of ~$100 / month.
From a business point of view, none of this makes sense. Why would you require customers to pay such a huge upfront price even before they've started using your product? And why not roll everything into monthly pricing? Anyway, I'm going off topic..
SoftComply eQMS: Only Documents and Templates?
The biggest question here is what you get for the $2.4k one-off price. Based on the slightly confusing website, it actually seems like you're purchasing documents and templates and not receiving any sort of software.
If that's so, then damn, you just lost me there. Because our templates are free, and they're probably even better because they've gone through more audits.
So why would anyone in their right mind pay $2.4k for templates if you get better ones for free?
As you can see, I'm kinda lost here because we haven't even started looking at the other 6 products which were apparently not part of the eQMS product page: Risk Manager (not to be confused with Risk Manager Plus), Risk Manager (not to be confused with Risk Manager), the Information Security Risk manager (not to be confused with Risk Manager, or Risk Manager Plus), and.. I'll just stop there.
Suffice to say that choosing SoftComply is probably only viable if:
Your personal hobby is to understand the infinite combinatorial space of SoftComply pricing;
You look forward to explaining to your CEO which mix of SoftComply's 9 products you need, and why some of them charge huge upfront costs, while others charge monthly;
You love complexity and prefer to dive deep into complex product combinations instead of getting actual work done.
In all other scenarios, i.e. if you actually want to get stuff done and not start your PhD thesis on SoftComply pricing, you might be better served with our eQMS, Formwork. Here are its highlights in contrast to Softcomply:
Templates are free! No need to pay $2.4k for templates. Ours have passed audits.
No up-front eQMS price: Why pay a huge sum of $2.4k one-off just to get started?
Transparent pricing: Free, 99€ / month or 499€ / month. The latter comes with unlimited users!
We also have data centers: You don't have to choose between "cloud" or "data center". We have it all - we're running on the cloud which runs on data enters. The best of both worlds!
I’m a medical doctor, software engineer and regulatory dude. I’m also the founder of OpenRegulatory.
Through OpenRegulatory, I’ve helped 100+ companies with their medical device compliance. While it’s also my job that we stay profitable, I try to dedicate a lot of my time towards writing free content like our articles and templates. Maybe that will make consulting unnecessary some day? :)
If you’re still lost and have further questions, reach out any time!
