MasterControl describes itself as "Intelligent QMS + MES + CMMS built for Life Science". It's unclear what the hell MES and CMMS stand for, but at the very least, a prudent observer can conclude that MasterControl is indeed in the business of offering QMS software.

So here's our MasterControl QMS review.

MasterControl claims it's the "#1 QMS", but doesn't really specify by which metric. While they claim to have 1.1k customers, this metric by itself doesn't really make them #1, as many providers have that amount of customers. In fact, OpenRegulatory Formwork has more companies than that.. anyway.

Slightly confusingly, MasterControl markets software packages separately which actually sound like they should belong together as part of the same QMS software:

The website is unfortunately very light on details when it comes to actual features of each of these packages. Among other things, one big question would be whether the document control feature actually includes its own text editor or whether you have to "bring your own text editor" like e.g. with Greenlight Guru, which relies on a rather clunky process of you having to download Word files, edit them locally and re-upload them again.

Let's hope MasterControl has solved this in a better way.

Regarding the quality event management, MasterControl claims to offer a "no-code form and workflow builder", which probably means that you can define custom event types and string them together into some sort of process. That by itself sounds good, and also shows that they're targeting enterprise customers as this level of customizability is mostly requested by enterprises.

Many other "features" on the MasterControl website are simply buzzwords which are not very useful. My personal highlights:

MasterControl has jumped on the AI hype train and shipped various AI tools to its QMS software.

They claim to have the following features:

It's hard to say whether these are useful or not. Generating exams for training might be genuinely useful, as we've shipped a similar feature a while ago. Other aspects sound less useful, especially the document translator - those are not really new AI use cases.

And then there's of course the question why a feature labelled "Search" is sold an AI feature, which makes the whole list less trustworthy, chuckle.. but let's assume good intentions here, and let's also assume that the other AI features might actually be useful.

Check out our separate article on MasterControl pricing. In short, you're looking at prices of at least $25k+ / year, with significant risk of prices increasing once you need more user seats. Prices tend to be customized in individual offers, based on how much perceived money MasterControl can extract from your company.

We've written up a separate article on MasterControl alternatives. The short summary is that all enterprise eQMS software providers offer more or less the same: A clunky Windows 95 user interface, a lengthy sales process and high cost. Commonly mentioned alternatives are Dot Compliance, Greenlight Guru, Qualio and SimplerQMS.

No one ever got fired for choosing IBM - likewise, no one is going to get fired for choosing MasterControl as their QMS software.

If you're working at a large enterprise company and optimizing for keeping your job, choosing MasterControl might be a viable choice. The drawbacks to that decision are that actually using the software is likely going to be very painful due to the Windows 95 vibes (but maybe fine if you yourself don't have to deal with it, chuckle), the software itself will be very expensive (also fine if it's not your money), and the overall clunkiness of the software is likely going to slow down your company's processes tremendously.

For many enterprises, these trade-offs are worth it, because enterprises have a weird obsession of purchasing software from other enterprise companies, irrespective of rational reasons and how good that software actually is.

If, however, you're more rationally-minded and looking for an eQMS software which is actually good, regardless of enterprise marketing stunts, a software which enables your company to move fast and use the latest AI features while being the most affordable eQMS software out there, take a look at ours. Take a look at Formwork.

It's seriously awesome - free, 99€ or 499€ per month, and the latter tier has unlimited seats! Passed many EU and FDA audits (just like MasterControl!), and fast-moving, founder-led companies love it because it's simple, easy to use and enables you to create your medical device documentation in record time.

Then again.. we might be biased, because Formwork is our software. We built it because we looked at the eQMS software market and only saw mediocre enterprise choices (which were also overpriced). So yeah. Check out Formwork.