Benchling

Lab friendly online notebook and so much more

Commentaires : Having all the laboratory notes online in an issue to use format allows for quick sharing of protocols and real-time collaboration on the same projects.

Avantages :

Benchling is easy to use, great for everyday notes and protocol design. It makes sharing experimental details and lab notes simple. In addition, easy to search for keywords throughout all the notebooks, never lose data or key pieces of information again. The molecular biology suite is the best, easy cloning and sequences alignments.

Inconvénients :

Would love to have access to sample repository and tracking but need the paid version. Better integration with storage options for big data.

Wonderful digital lab notebook

Commentaires : Overall, Benchling has been wonderful for switching from an archaic experiment documentation system to a well organized, collaborate online system.

Avantages :

Benchling is a very useful tool for organizing and collaborating on scientific data online. Online notebooks make it very easy to record and find previous data, which you will always have to cross reference much later after your experiment. The different folders and entries are very easy to organize, and you can create shared collaborative documents as well as your own private notebooks.

Inconvénients :

One small Con is that adding figures/images to the entries takes up a lot of space in the notebook, since text and other images/tables/figures cannot wrap around each other. This means that if you're including many images, your entry will be very long, and you can't include too many images together.

Benchling Implementation at Tenaya

Commentaires : Overall, Benchling has hugely helped our company to come together to decide what the important pieces of our work are that we need to capture, and how to efficiently pass information off team to team. The implementation team has been incredibly helpful in the process.

Avantages :

I am thrilled to be able to easily tailor the software to the individual needs of scientists as everyone plays incredibly different roles, but we all come together to look at the data as a whole to make large company decisions. We have not been using the software as an entire company just yet, but we have liked the implementation process with Benchling's support to create the platform our company needs to be successful.

Inconvénients :

One of the challenges we have found as we've begun to use Benchling more is that there are some features we've gotten used to using and rely on, but then they will disappear. We understand Benchling is constantly changing and tweaking to better help R&D, but some changes come out of nowhere and mess some of our plans up. Most changes are minor here or there, but when needing to count on a software for easier day-to-day use you need the simple things to work.

Functional and Customizable

Avantages :

How customizable all features are for your specific process and how willing and available customer support is to help.

Inconvénients :

It is not intuitive for first time users and takes some practice to learn all the features.

Our lab loves this website

Commentaires : Overall I'd highly recommend this for any academic lab planning to use an ELN.

Avantages :

This is a great way to have a collaborative electronic lab notebook among a lab. Easy to share protocols and lab notes, and it's also easy to update the notebook by date and topic. Overall it will be hard to go back to a printed lab notebook after using Benchling. I also like the sequence feature, I refuse to use anything else (ex. Geneious, ApE) for sequence analysis.

Inconvénients :

Sometimes it can be slow, especially when uploading files to the notebook pages. Also, it would be nice to have photos in a grid form rather than one per line in the notebook. It can make the entries lengthy if there are so many pictures (ex. plate pictures).