[Aaron]

Alex,

Thank you for the detailed reply. Those are very good points that you bring up and I agree that companies don’t always think carefully enough about their real needs from an eQMS or other enterprise software. In my consulting work I focus on risk management and design controls and don’t set up quality systems. However, I work with many startups and am often asked for a recommendation for an eQMS, especially for ones that are suitable to small companies on a tight budget.

More frequently, I help clients implement requirements management tools, test management tools, and issue tracking tools which used to be referred to as “ALM systems” but now I find they’re sometimes called eQMS, which is confusing. As you point out, a good comparison table should show how very different some of these software packages are. For example, Jira is an issue tracking tool that over the past 15 years has acquired many more features but it’s still best suited for tracking tasks and issues in tickets. It would be a stretch to call it an eQMS but I believe it was included in the comparison table because SW teams who are new to medical devices may think they can do everything with Jira (or GitHub or G-suite).

So I think a new version of the comparison table I shared, that actually compares key eQMS features of various SW tools (not just pricing, licensing, hosting) would be very valuable in this forum.

Any volunteers?

-Aaron