RockEnrollers

Head to head

AutoCruitment vs Antidote

Paid-media volume versus advocacy-sourced quality.

Model

AutoCruitment

Patient recruitment agency

Antidote

Patient community / registry

In one line

AutoCruitment

Direct-to-patient digital recruitment with a proprietary pre-screener.

Antidote

Matches patients through a network of health advocacy and publisher partners.

What they do

AutoCruitment

Runs paid digital campaigns (largely social and search) into a branded pre-screening funnel, then routes qualified referrals to sites. The pitch is speed: campaigns can be live within days of protocol sign-off, and sponsors see referral volume quickly.

Antidote

Operates a trial-matching layer embedded across health nonprofits, patient advocacy organizations, and health publishers. Patients encounter the matcher in a context they already trust rather than through a cold ad.

Pricing

AutoCruitment

Typically a campaign fee plus media spend, sometimes with per-referral or performance components. Publicly listed pricing is not available; ask for cost per randomized patient, not cost per referral.

Antidote

Generally program-based pricing tied to the partner network and indication. Request the split between partner-sourced and paid-media-sourced referrals.

Strengths

AutoCruitment

  • Fast campaign launch and high top-of-funnel referral volume
  • Well-developed pre-screening technology and site-facing portal
  • Markets dermatology and other visible-symptom indications heavily in its published case studies

Antidote

  • Advocacy and publisher partnerships put the matcher in front of engaged patients
  • Publicly focused on conditions with an organized patient community
  • Positions itself on referral quality rather than raw volume

Watch for

AutoCruitment

  • Referral volume is not enrollment. Ask for the referral-to-randomization ratio on studies like yours.
  • Ask how many referrals per week your coordinators will be expected to work, and what happens if they cannot keep up.
  • Its public materials centre on paid digital channels. Ask what share of referrals came from non-paid sources, and how performance held up when media costs rose.

Antidote

  • Ask which advocacy and publisher partners are live in your indication and your countries — reach follows the network
  • Ask how quickly volume can be scaled if you fall behind plan, and what the paid-media fallback looks like

Best for

AutoCruitment

Sponsors with a broad, self-identifying patient population and sites that have coordinator bandwidth to work a large referral queue.

Antidote

Chronic and rare conditions with active advocacy groups, where credibility matters more than raw volume.

Poor fit

AutoCruitment

Ultra-rare indications where the addressable population cannot be reached economically through paid social.

Antidote

Studies needing very large volume in a short window in a common indication.

Read more

AutoCruitment

Full AutoCruitment profile

Antidote

Full Antidote profile

When AutoCruitment is the right call

Pick AutoCruitment when the constraint is top-of-funnel volume, your sites have coordinator capacity to work a heavy referral flow, and the indication is one people search for or recognise in themselves.

When Antidote is the right call

Pick Antidote when your indication has an organised patient community and your problem is referral quality rather than referral count — sites drowning in unqualified leads rarely get better by adding more.

How to actually decide

Ask both for referral-to-randomization on three studies resembling yours, in the same countries. Then price on cost per randomized patient, not cost per referral. If Antidote's partner network is thin in your indication, its main advantage disappears; if your coordinators are already behind, AutoCruitment's volume becomes a cost rather than a benefit.

Do not pick on capability decks. Give both the same brief — your protocol, your countries, your screen failure assumptions — and ask each for the referral-to- randomization ratio they achieved on the three most similar studies they have run. Then price both on cost per randomized patient. The comparison usually resolves itself at that point, and often reveals that neither is the problem: the enrollment assumptions in the protocol were wrong from the start.

Our sister publication Rock Enroll covers that diagnosis in depth for sponsors and CRO teams.