Syncra vs Castor EDC
Two points on the trial lifecycle — one decides which trial is worth building, the other stands up the EDC once you do.
Sponsor Ops teams evaluating clinical trial enrollment software and EDC platforms usually land on a similar shortlist: Castor EDC for fast, open-source-friendly study build, and Syncra for pre-pilot enrollment risk scoring plus network-wide coordination. Both products touch the same enrollment failure modes — they reach the answer from different directions and at different points in the trial lifecycle.
Castor EDC excels at study-build speed — its form builder and eCRF templates let you stand up data capture in days, not months, and its open-source posture makes it a frequent pick for academic sites and indie sponsors. Syncra's Instant Risk Report scores enrollment risk before you've onboarded a single site, using public protocol metadata and sponsor-supplied PDFs — no EHR rip-and-replace required. If your bottleneck is 'we need to capture data from sites quickly,' Castor's EDC flow is built for that. If your bottleneck is 'which trial is going to miss enrollment before sites even go live,' Syncra answers in 30 seconds.
This page walks through both products across the same five dimensions sponsor Ops cares about most: data sources, scoring methodology, daily outputs, multi-site behavior, and pricing posture.
| Dimension | Syncra | Castor EDC |
|---|---|---|
| Data sources | ClinicalTrials.gov v2 protocol metadata plus sponsor-supplied protocol PDFs summarized by an OpenAI extractor. Instant — no site agreements, no EHR ingest, no EDC configuration to start. [1] | Site-configured eCRFs, surveys, and dashboards inside the Castor EDC instance, with optional REDCap export. Per-site onboarding and EDC database go-live required before any data is captured. [2] |
| Scoring methodology | 0–100 portfolio/trial-level Enrollment Risk Score tuned against Tufts CSDD benchmarks (indication feasibility, phase, site count, target N, window, criteria complexity). Per-patient scoring available after EHR integration. [3] | eCRF-level query resolution rate, completeness, and study-build effort metrics — oriented to 'how clean is the data we already collected,' not 'will this trial miss enrollment.' [2] |
| Outputs | 1-page PDF enrollment risk report emailed within ~30 seconds, daily recruiter queue of next-best patients, Multi-Site Coordinator daily plan. [1] | Configured eCRFs ready for sites, dashboards for monitoring data completeness, and on-demand exports. Enrollment failure risk is not surfaced at the protocol stage. [2] |
| Multi-site support | Built-in cross-site capacity rebalancing and conflict avoidance — the Multi-Site Coordinator allocates each new referral to the open cohort slot across the network. [1] | Per-site independent EDC instances (sometimes federated under a single sponsor). Cross-site coordination, conflict avoidance, and capacity rebalancing remain the sponsor's job. [2] |
| Pricing posture | Pilot-led. Instant Risk Report funnel is free. Paid engagement only after a pilot closes. [1] | Tiered subscription. Self-serve and unlimited-EDC tiers are marketed to academic and indie sponsors; enterprise tiers are quote-based and typically five-figure annual. [2] |
The two products address different jobs in the trial lifecycle — but sponsor Ops rarely has the bandwidth to evaluate them in parallel. If you don't yet have a study-build fire (you're still deciding which trials to greenlight or whether your existing portfolio will hit N), Syncra's pre-pilot risk score is the cheaper signal: it runs on protocol metadata alone and tells you which trial deserves the EDC build-out budget in the first place.
If you're already running multiple competing trials across a site network, the Multi-Site Coordinator fills a capability Castor EDC doesn't claim: cross-site capacity rebalancing and conflict avoidance between trials competing for the same patient pool. Combined with Castor's eCRF speed once you've made the go decision, that gives your Ops team a clean handoff between portfolio triage (Syncra) and per-study data capture (Castor EDC).
Drop in an NCT number and a work email. We pull the protocol, score it, and email you a 1-page risk report within ~30 seconds. No EHR integration needed.
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