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Epi Info vs REDCap

Both are free survey and outbreak-data tools, but Epi Info needs no membership while REDCap requires consortium access and self-hosting.

Side by side

Epi Info REDCap
Vendor U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vanderbilt University (REDCap Consortium)
Pricing model Free Free
Free tier Yes Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted Self-hosted
Open source No No
Best for Health departments and field epidemiologists needing free outbreak data collection and statistics without a commercial license. Non-profit and academic institutions needing a self-hosted, no-license-fee platform for research and surveillance data collection.
Pricing

Free public-domain software published directly by the CDC; no license fee or paid tier.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free to non-profit and government institutions that join the REDCap Consortium and self-host; not sold commercially or per seat.

Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.

Features
  • Custom questionnaire and data-entry form builder
  • Outbreak line-listing and case management
  • Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis
  • Epidemiologic measures (odds ratios, attack rates)
  • Windows desktop, mobile, and web/cloud versions
  • Data visualization and mapping
  • No-cost distribution with no license required
  • Drag-and-drop survey and form builder
  • Branching logic and skip patterns
  • Longitudinal and repeating data collection
  • Audit trails and role-based access
  • Export to SAS, SPSS, R, and Stata
  • Consortium-based institutional distribution model
  • Self-hosted deployment by each member institution

Verdict

Epi Info and REDCap do similar core work — building data-entry forms, capturing line-list or registry data, and supporting statistical analysis — but they reach users through different doors. Epi Info is published directly and freely by the CDC: download it, no registration or membership required. REDCap is distributed through the REDCap Consortium; only non-profit and government institutions that join can get the codebase, and each member institution then runs and supports its own self-hosted instance. The choice is often made for you by whether your institution already belongs to the consortium.

Choose Epi Info if

  • You need to start an outbreak investigation immediately, without waiting on an institutional membership process.
  • You work in a lower-resource setting where a commercial statistics package or an institutional REDCap instance is not available.
  • You want desktop, mobile and web/cloud options for field data collection, not just a browser application.

Choose REDCap if

  • Your institution is already a REDCap Consortium member — the software itself costs nothing more to use.
  • You are running longitudinal, multi-site research or a registry, where REDCap's branching logic, repeating instruments and audit trails matter more than for a single outbreak line list.
  • You need self-hosted control over where research data lives, and you have the IT capacity to run and secure that instance yourself.

The honest caveat

Neither is free in the sense of requiring nothing from you. Epi Info costs no license fee and no membership, but it is a downloadable application your team supports itself. REDCap costs no license fee either, but "free" only applies once your institution has joined the consortium and taken on hosting and maintaining its own instance — a real ongoing cost that a quoted commercial tool would otherwise carry for you. Confirm consortium eligibility and hosting capacity before assuming REDCap is the cheaper option.

Last reviewed September 22, 2026

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