LabArchives

Electronic lab notebook with witnessing, version history and long-term institutional retention

As of 31 August 2026, LabArchives has a free plan and paid plans start at $330/year. LabArchives replaces the paper lab notebook with a versioned, timestamped, signable record designed to survive an audit or a patent dispute. Softwr lists it under Research. LabArchives is made by LabArchives (Dotmatics), available on Web, iOS, Android.

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Overview

What LabArchives does

LabArchives is a browser-based electronic lab notebook. Entries are versioned so no edit destroys the prior state, every change is timestamped and attributed, and pages can be signed and countersigned by a witness. Beyond the notebook there are separate Inventory and Scheduler products for sample tracking and shared instrument booking, and an Education edition used for teaching laboratory courses. What sets it apart commercially is fit with universities. It sells institution-wide site licences to research offices, integrates with single sign-on and the campus learning management system, and its retention model assumes records must outlive the postdoc who created them, which is exactly the problem a departing researcher's laptop creates. It is also one of very few ELN vendors that publishes list prices at all: at the time of writing, Professional is listed at $330 academic or $575 corporate per user per year, with an ELN plus Inventory bundle at $360 academic or $675 corporate. Buyers are academic research groups, core facilities and small biotech companies. The ownership fact matters: LabArchives is part of Dotmatics, itself part of a much larger scientific software portfolio, so it is one line in a roadmap that increasingly favours enterprise pharmaceutical customers. Labs choosing it for its academic pricing should watch what happens to that pricing over a renewal cycle or two.

What people use it for

A university group that must keep research records after a PhD student leaves, rather than losing them with a laptop
A core facility that needs instrument booking and a shared record of who ran what and when
A small biotech building patent-defensible evidence of invention with witnessed, timestamped entries
A teaching department running undergraduate laboratory courses where instructors need to see and grade notebook work

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 LabArchives.

The corporate rate is roughly 75 per cent above the academic rate for the same product, so a university spinout crossing into commercial status faces a step change in cost at exactly the point its budget is tightest.
Inventory and Scheduler are separate per-user line items, so a lab that assumed one price per person for a working system ends up paying two or three.
It is now a Dotmatics product inside a large scientific software portfolio, which puts roadmap priority with enterprise pharmaceutical buyers rather than with the academic labs that made it popular.
The interface is functional rather than pleasant, and adoption typically fails not on features but on researchers quietly continuing to keep notes elsewhere; you need a mandate, not a rollout email.
Instrument integration is thin compared with dedicated laboratory information management systems, so automated capture from analytical equipment usually still means manual upload or custom scripting.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of LabArchives

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

LabArchivesvs
Jupyter
Jupyter: If your records are computational rather than wet-lab and a versioned notebook in Git meets your retention needs
LabArchivesvs
Box
Box: If the requirement is only shared, retained file storage for a group rather than a witnessed experimental record
LabArchivesvs
Microsoft OneDrive
Microsoft OneDrive: If your institution already mandates it and you can accept file versioning without signing or witnessing

Pricing

What LabArchives costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Free

Limited storage
Core notebook and versioning
Intended for evaluation and individual use

Professional (Academic)

$330 /yr

Full ELN with witnessing and signing
Academic rate per user per year
Corporate rate is $575 per user per year

ELN plus Inventory bundle

$360 /yr

Notebook plus sample and reagent inventory
Academic rate; corporate rate is $675 per user per year

Inventory standalone

$99 /yr

Sample tracking without the notebook
Academic rate; corporate rate is $199 per user per year

Scheduler

$35 /yr

Instrument and facility booking
Academic rate; corporate rate is $105 per user per year

Capabilities

Features

Versioned entries
Every revision is retained and attributed; nothing is overwritten
Witnessing and signing
Page-level electronic signature and countersignature for patent and audit evidence
Inventory
Sample, reagent and freezer location tracking, sold as a separate per-user product
Scheduler
Booking for shared instruments and facilities, priced separately again
Education edition
Structured lab course notebooks with instructor grading views
Single sign-on
Institutional identity integration for campus-wide deployment
Structured data entry
Templates and widgets so protocol results are captured as fields rather than free text
DOI and repository publishing
Export of notebook pages for citation and long-term archiving

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.

Does LabArchives satisfy patent evidence requirements?

Its versioning, timestamping and witnessed signatures are designed for that purpose, and it is widely accepted for it, but the legal weight depends on your institution's process being followed, not on the software alone.

Who owns LabArchives?

Dotmatics. The product is branded LabArchives by Dotmatics and shares that company's corporate footprint.

Is there really a free tier?

Yes, with limited storage. It is suitable for trialling or a single researcher, not for a group that needs retention guarantees.

Can we export everything if we leave?

Yes, notebooks export in bulk, but exported archives lose much of the interactive structure, so treat the export as an archive rather than as a migration path into another ELN.

Keep looking

Where to go from LabArchives

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for LabArchives, 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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