SimplerQMS is a rather new entrant to the weird market of QMS software as it only was founded in 2022 by two Danish dudes - Allan Murphy Bruun and Jacob Sjørslev Hyrdum.

Now, being founded rather recently, the hope any observer would have would be something like "hey cool, finally a new company which is building QMS software - maybe now we'll finally get a modern QMS which is polished, AI-first, and a great choice for startups". But.. nope, none of those things came true.

What you get instead is yet another UI implementation of Windows 95, unfortunately. If you've been in this weird industry for a while, like me, this is almost a running joke nowadays - any time a new regulatory consultancy gets founded, their website is insanely crappy. And every time a new entrant builds eQMS software, their UI ends up looking like Windows 95.

I don't know how this happens - I imagine it to actually be quite hard to hire UI designers in 2022 who are still able to come up with "Windows 95 design", but apparently it seems to be possible. Maybe it's an unwritten rule of B2B software that UI design must always look like this, because your target audience of enterprise company CEOs are still accustomed to this user interface.

Anyway! Let's backtrack a moment: I had the opportunity to talk to an ex - notified body auditor who now works as a regulatory consultant (as all auditors tend to do - a topic for another day), and he was working with a company which had recently purchased SimplerQMS.

I had a chance to talk to him about his experience and get his take on SimplerQMS. In short, here's what he said:

So there you have it.

If you're a sane, rational person looking for a useful and polished eQMS software, SimplerQMS is not for you. 

That being said, I don't think it's totally bad - it just blends into the very mediocre landscape of B2B eQMS software, next to Qualio, Greenlight Guru and Matrix Requirements. All of those products also don't really stand out for their features (or user interface), but they don't have to, as their revenue is mainly driven by sales and marketing strategies, not by product features.

And that's it for the opinionated review. Read on if you're interested in the bland, feature-based review.

I wrote a separate post on the SimplerQMS pricing here, because it's actually quite interesting. First off, they also name their cheapest tier "Starter", just like us, chuckle. No coincidence there, right?

Besides that, it's interesting that they actually do list a price, because most companies building Windows 95 software nowadays tend to hide their prices behind friendly "talk to sales" buttons. The Starter price "starts at $1,200 / month". So if you're looking for a specific price, this is entirely useless, because you still have to talk to sales. But if you're looking for a rough indication, this is actually quite useful as it essentially states their minimum price, which is $1,200.

A quick comparison: Our eQMS software, Formwork, has three tiers: free, 99€ and 499€ per month. The 99€ tier (also named "Starter") is the best comparison here as it also includes 5 seats, similar to the SimplerQMS Starter plan. The feature set is that same, but the SimplerQMS price is higher by whopping factor of 12x. In reality, that factor is even higher as you likely have to commit to a minimum contract running 1-3 years or so, while you can cancel Formwork monthly with no commitment.

So yeah, 12x of what you might consider a market rate for eQMS software, so it's rather expensive.

But then again, this is mostly a standard price if you look at other "enterprise" QMS software vendors like Greenlight Guru and Qualio, which have similar prices. So it's rather us being the anomaly here, not companies like SimplerQMS.

Talking about money, let's look at their funding next.

SimplerQMS most recently received an additional €4M of funding in April 2025. The companies which have invested haven't been published, but it's likely that these were private venture capital (VC) investors, i.e. not public funding.

There are four main take-aways from this:

None of this is uniformly good or bad. It mostly boils down to what sort of supplier you prefer when you purchase your eQMS software. For what it's worth, it's pretty "normal" in this industry to be VC-funded, as this also applies to Greenlight Guru and Qualio.

Still, companies without VC funding generally have a better sustainability profile, because they're usually founder-owned and profitable - this means that they are not subject to any pressure from "outsiders" (investors) to grow their company aggressively, and they're also not forced to sell the company down the line, both of which usually come with a worse customer experience.

Notably, Matrix Requirements was one of the last few "holdouts" being founder owned, but sadly the founders sold the company to a private equity fund in 2022.

And then there's us at OpenRegulatory - OpenRegulatory is still 100% founder-owned by Oliver, the founder (hey, that's me!), so we are not subject to any pressure to raise prices, do aggressive marketing or any other shady stuff. And we've been profitable since 2020. The cool thing is that this enables us to do awesome stuff like publishing our medical device compliance templates for free, and offering our eQMS software, Formwork, for crazy good prices, e.g. 99€ / month. If that sort of stuff resonates with you, check out Formwork!

In all other cases, check out SimplerQMS.

I've been ranting a lot here, but.. when should you choose SimplerQMS?

I think there's a fair case to be made when SimplerQMS might be a valid (I'm not saying "good") choice for you and your company:

In broader terms, these criteria simply apply to all B2B software purchases. So if you're looking to do a "normal" B2B software purchase, a strategy for that would be to solicit offers from Greenlight Guru, Qualio, SimplerQMS and all the other B2B vendors out there.

But don't expect to receive great software, and certainly don't expect to receive a good value for the (huge) price you'll be paying.