A Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) is a software-based laboratory and information management system that provides streamlined workflow automation and management. This type of software is typically used in analytical laboratories such as R&D labs, in-process testing labs and quality assurance labs.

A LIMS seeks to embrace the way you work, offering single sample, batch samples and manual or automated methods, producing reports for internal or external customer use. Management of resources is an important characteristic of planning work allocation against availability and for auto analysers around calibration and maintenance schedules.

There are a number of benefits a LIMS brings to the laboratory environment, most significantly; increased productivity and improved data quality, both of which reduce operating costs and free up human resources from mundane activities. This type of software also serves to improve capacity, offering faster turnaround time for customers, higher accuracy and quality control, live searches, and can interface with other departments.

The task of selecting the best LIMS for an organization can be complicated, in part, because many terms used to describe very different LIMS and system architectures are used interchangeably.

Here’s our open source recommendations.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 12 open source LIMS that are worth investigating. We recommend experimenting with them to see if they meet your requirements. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone wanting to control, manage, organize and document information.

Now, let’s explore the laboratory information management systems at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources.

Laboratory Information Management System eLabFTW Electronic lab notebook manager for research teams SENAITE Enterprise Open Source Laboratory System OpenMRS Enterprise electronic medical record system platform Bika LIMS Powerful, flexible web based LIMS with full content management integration C4G BLIS Track patients, specimens and laboratory results Baobab LIMS LIMS for biobanking GNomEx Genomic LIMS and Data Repository Occhiolino Modern Laboratory Information Management System FreeLIMS Lets users perform Bio-Informatics MetaLIMS LIMS for small metagenomic laboratories Open-LIMS Management for projects, samples and their related data OpenELIS Designed for resource-constrained laboratories

Return to our complete collection of recommended free and open source software including our latest additions.

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