RockEnrollers

Head to head

Trialfacts vs AutoCruitment

Guarantee-backed small studies versus scaled campaigns.

Model

Trialfacts

Patient recruitment agency

AutoCruitment

Patient recruitment agency

In one line

Trialfacts

Guarantee-backed recruitment aimed at smaller and investigator-initiated studies.

AutoCruitment

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

What they do

Trialfacts

Recruits primarily through digital channels for academic, investigator-initiated, and smaller commercial studies, and is unusual in offering a recruitment guarantee structure rather than a pure fee-for-effort arrangement.

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.

Pricing

Trialfacts

Guarantee-linked pricing: fees tied to delivering an agreed number of qualified participants. Read the qualification definition in the contract carefully.

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.

Strengths

Trialfacts

  • Risk-sharing commercial model is rare in this market
  • Works at study sizes most large vendors decline
  • Transparent about what they will and will not take on

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

Watch for

Trialfacts

  • Guarantee attaches to a contract definition of 'qualified', not to randomizations
  • Not built for large global Phase III programs

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.

Best for

Trialfacts

Academic groups, small biotechs, and single-site or few-site studies.

AutoCruitment

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

Poor fit

Trialfacts

Multi-country registrational programs with hundreds of sites.

AutoCruitment

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

Read more

Trialfacts

Full Trialfacts profile

AutoCruitment

Full AutoCruitment profile

When Trialfacts is the right call

Pick Trialfacts when the study is small, the budget is fixed, and a stated enrollment guarantee matters more than raw scale.

When AutoCruitment is the right call

Pick AutoCruitment when you need volume across many sites and countries at once.

How to actually decide

Read the guarantee before it decides anything: what triggers it, what it pays back, whether it covers randomized patients or referrals, and what site-side conditions void it. A guarantee tied to referrals transfers no real risk. Ask both for cost per randomized patient on studies of your size, not their largest programs.

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.