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LabArchives vs SciNote

Both are accessible ELNs with real free tiers; SciNote's free plan is more generous, LabArchives has more established instrument integrations.

Side by side

LabArchives SciNote
Vendor LabArchives, LLC SciNote LLC
Pricing model Subscription Free tier + paid plans
Free tier Yes Yes
Deployment Cloud Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No No
Best for Academic and corporate research labs needing a compliant, timestamped electronic lab notebook. Academic labs wanting a capable free ELN, and industry labs needing validated, compliance-ready notebooks.
Pricing

Per-user annual pricing with separate academic and corporate rates; a limited free tier is available.

Free $0
Professional (academic) $330/year
Professional (corporate) $575/year
ELN + Inventory Bundle (academic) $360/year

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Free tier with a full team and 10GB storage; paid Premium/Industry plans are quoted directly.

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

Features
  • Timestamped electronic lab notebook
  • SnapGene and GraphPad Prism integrations
  • NIH data-management plan support
  • Add-on inventory tracking module
  • Add-on equipment scheduling module
  • SAML SSO and developer API (Enterprise)
  • Academic and corporate pricing tiers
  • Electronic lab notebook with protocol templates
  • Free tier with unlimited team users
  • 21 CFR Part 11/GxP validation documentation option
  • Electronic signatures and audit trails
  • AI manuscript-writing assistant
  • Cloud or self-hosted deployment
  • Inventory management module

Verdict

LabArchives and SciNote are the two most accessible electronic lab notebooks in this category — both offer a genuine free tier rather than a time-limited trial, and both serve academic and corporate labs without requiring the enterprise sales process that Dotmatics, Labguru, Revvity Signals or Sapio Sciences involve. SciNote's free tier is the more generous of the two: a full team, unlimited users and 10GB of storage at no cost. LabArchives' free tier is more limited (two owned notebooks, 1GB of storage per user, a 25MB file cap) but the platform has established integrations with SnapGene and GraphPad Prism, and separate academic ($330/year per user) and corporate ($575/year per user) pricing once a lab outgrows the free plan.

Choose LabArchives if

  • Your lab already uses SnapGene or GraphPad Prism and wants direct integration.
  • You need NIH data-management-plan compliance and want a notebook built with that funder requirement in mind.
  • You want add-on Inventory and Scheduler modules from the same vendor rather than a separate system.

Choose SciNote if

  • Team size or budget makes a genuinely free, full-team tier valuable rather than a capped trial.
  • You are in industry and need 21 CFR Part 11/GxP-aligned validation documentation (IQ/OQ), which SciNote offers on its Industry plans.
  • You want the option to self-host rather than being locked to cloud-only deployment — SciNote supports both; LabArchives is cloud-only.

What they share

Both are timestamped ELNs built to establish intellectual property and satisfy research-data-management requirements, both serve academic and corporate customers side by side, and neither publishes full pricing for their higher, compliance-focused tiers — LabArchives' Enterprise plan and SciNote's Premium/Industry plans are both quote-based. Neither is built for heavy sample and instrument inventory tracking the way a combined ELN/LIMS platform like Labguru is; if that is the real gap in your lab, look there instead.

Last reviewed September 22, 2026

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