REDCap
Research data capture licensed free to non-profits, and not licensable at all to companies
As of 31 August 2026, REDCap's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. A survey and research data capture application from Vanderbilt, provided at no licence cost to non-profit and government institutions that join its consortium and host it themselves. Softwr lists it under Research. REDCap is made by Vanderbilt University, available on Web, Linux, Windows.
Overview
What REDCap does
REDCap is a web application for building and managing online surveys and research databases, developed at Vanderbilt University and distributed to a consortium of institutional partners. It covers form design, data dictionaries, branching logic, longitudinal event scheduling, randomisation, data quality rules, an audit trail and export to statistical packages, and it has features aimed at regulated research including electronic signatures and 21 CFR Part 11 supporting configuration. The licensing model is the thing to understand before anything else. REDCap is licensed at no cost, but only to non-profit institutions and government organisations that join the consortium, and those institutions install and run it on their own infrastructure. It is not permissible for a business or other for-profit organisation to hold a licence or self-host REDCap. Companies that want REDCap have to go through a commercially licensed hosted route rather than run their own. Vanderbilt also charges an annual fee for REDCap+ features on top of the free non-profit licence. The practical buyer is a university, hospital or research institute whose IT department already runs an instance, in which case a research group gets it free at the point of use. The trade-off is that support quality, uptime, version currency and validation status are entirely determined by that local institution, not by Vanderbilt, so two researchers at different universities using REDCap are not using the same service.
What people use it for
- An academic research group at an institution that already runs REDCap, where a new study database costs nothing beyond the time to build it
- A hospital collecting patient reported outcomes where data must stay on institutional infrastructure rather than a vendor cloud
- An investigator initiated trial that needs randomisation, an audit trail and statistical export without a commercial EDC budget
- A multi site academic collaboration where each site can be given scoped access to a single longitudinal project
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The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about REDCap.
- A for-profit company cannot hold a licence or self-host REDCap, so a biotech or CRO that liked it at university simply cannot deploy it the same way and must buy a commercially licensed hosted version instead.
- Because each institution hosts its own instance, support, uptime, backup and version currency vary by university, and a researcher has no recourse to Vanderbilt when the local instance is two years out of date.
- It is free of licence fee but not free of cost: the hosting institution carries server, security, patching and support staffing, which is why some institutions charge internal recharges per project.
- Validation for regulated use is the deploying institution responsibility, so an instance is not Part 11 compliant simply because REDCap supports the features; someone locally has to produce and maintain the evidence.
- The interface and reporting are dated compared with commercial survey and EDC tools, and complex logic is built through data dictionary spreadsheets rather than a modern visual builder, which slows non technical study teams.
Pricing
What REDCap costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
REDCap non-profit licence
On request
- No licence fee to non-profit and government institutions that join the consortium
- Institution must install and host it on its own infrastructure
- For-profit organisations may not hold a licence or self-host
- REDCap+ features carry an annual fee set by Vanderbilt
- Commercial use runs through a separately licensed hosted offering
Capabilities
Features
Form and survey designer
Data dictionary driven instrument design with branching logic and calculated fields
Longitudinal projects
Event scheduling and repeating instruments for multi visit study designs
Data quality rules
Configurable validation rules and discrepancy reporting across records
Randomisation
Built in allocation with stratification for randomised study designs
Audit trail and e-signature
Change logging and signature configuration used to support Part 11 aligned deployments
API and exports
Programmatic access and direct export to R, SAS, SPSS and Stata
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is REDCap really free?
The licence is free to non-profit institutions and government organisations that join the consortium, but they must host and support it themselves, so there is real internal cost.
Can my company use REDCap?
Not by holding a licence or self-hosting. For-profit organisations must use a separately licensed commercial hosted route.
Is REDCap 21 CFR Part 11 compliant?
It has the features to support Part 11 use, but compliance depends on how the hosting institution configures, validates and documents its own instance.
Who supports it?
Your local institutional REDCap administrator, not Vanderbilt. Support quality varies by site.
Keep looking
Where to go from REDCap
- REDCap alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- REDCap pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- REDCap badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Research softwareThe full category
- Best Research softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Research software for
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for REDCap, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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