# Benchling Reviews **Vendor:** Benchling **Category:** [LIMS Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/lims) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 65 ## About Benchling We are rebuilding biotech for the AI era. When a breakthrough is delayed, the world waits. Getting a molecule from discovery to patients, or a crop from lab to field, involves thousands of slow, manual, disconnected steps. AI has the potential to change this, compressing decades of R&D work into years. But that only happens when clean, structured scientific data and AI are built into how science gets done. Benchling is the AI platform for biotech R&D. Scientists use Benchling to design experiments, capture structured data, and run AI agents and models directly in their workflows. Over 200,000 scientists around the world trust Benchling to power their most important work, from academic labs to Sanofi, Moderna, and more than half of the world's top 50 biopharma. ## Benchling Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **collaboration features** of Benchling, enhancing teamwork with linked protocols and shared functionalities. (1 reviews) - Users value the **comprehensive history and repository** features in Benchling for ensuring Part 11 compliance. (1 reviews) - Users value the **comprehensive history and repository** provided by Benchling, ensuring robust compliance management. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **comprehensive history and repository** offered by Benchling, ensuring compliance in their workflows. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Benchling, benefiting from seamless organization and collaboration options. (1 reviews) - Users value the **ease of linking experiments** in Benchling, enhancing collaboration and organization in digital notebooks. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Benchling, enjoying features like functional tables and easy collaboration. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** in Protocol Management, enjoying seamless integration of protocols and collaboration features. (1 reviews) - Templates (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find **difficult navigation** in Benchling, hindering their ability to utilize it effectively as a tracking system. (2 reviews) - Users find the **difficult usability** of Benchling frustrating, leading to challenges in navigation and overall efficiency. (2 reviews) - Users find it challenging to **navigate Benchling** , leading to frustration and abandonment of the system for tracking purposes. (2 reviews) - Users have experienced **navigation issues** with Benchling, finding it challenging to use effectively for tracking purposes. (2 reviews) - Users find **data management issues** in Benchling, struggling with navigation and overall usability for tracking systems. (1 reviews) - Difficult Learning (1 reviews) - Learning Curve (1 reviews) - Poor Interface Design (1 reviews) - Poor Tracking System (1 reviews) ## Benchling Reviews ### 1. Great for Centralized Notebooks and Sharing, but Bulk Upload Needs Work **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nikita C. | Research associate, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 01, 2026 **What do you like best about Benchling?** It’s nice to have all my electronic notebooks and protocols stored in one place. It’s also great for sharing them with peers. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** It’s not great for uploading multiple cell lines or boxes at once. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** It’s useful for sharing protocols and creating e-notebooks. ### 2. Robust Compliance Features, But Navigation Needs Improvement **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Robert K. | Director of Science, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2025 **What do you like best about Benchling?** comprehensive history and repository in a Part 11 compliant environment **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Not sure how to use the audit trails, and it can be difficult to navigate intuitively **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provides a repository for batch information, data analysis, and study data ### 3. Good as a digital laboratory notebook **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2025 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I liked the ease of use as a digital laboratory notebook, the ability to add in functional tables, link detailed protocols, and tag people. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** I disliked the use of benchling as a data and sample tracking system. It was very difficult to both use and navigate even after getting something more complex built out for our use. We ended up scraping our use it for that purpose. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helped to have consise digital laboratory records that are easily accessible by many and can contain multiple researchers. ### 4. Benchling: A great tool for graduate school and industry **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I love the integration of an electronic lab notebook with a suite of tools for molecular cloning. As a molecular biologist, I use benchling constantly and it has made me a better scientist. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The worst thing about Benchling by far is the file management. It is tedious to move and duplicate files and challenging to search for files. Copying and pasting files is very clunky. I don't understand why they can't just do a normal file management set up like other programs. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling helps me a lot with mocleular cloning and keeping all of my sequences and primers organized in one place. It also helps me and my colleagues share and work on lab notebook entries simulatenously. ### 5. Seriously streamlined, intuitive, and user friendly **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ciaran L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Setting up new entity schemas and templates for users is super fast, thanks largely to the easy to use interface, and the great selection of built-in entities to choose from (dropdowns, dates, Sequence data etc). This allows us to very quickly set up new classes of data, and new types of document. The flexibility this comes with allows us to store a great variety of data within benchling, so we can have everything organized in one place. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The most obvious struggle with benchling is transferring objects from the test instance of benchling, to the live instance. Though it is great that these 2 instances are kept totally seperate, it does mean that I am repeating the process of object setup everytime I want to create a new entity schema or notebook template etc. Some mechanism to download finished objects from test and upload to live would save so much time and human error. additionally There are still some niche functionalities that would be useful for us, such as linking out to internal web-apps. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Taking lab documents (such as risk assessments and SOPs) online, recording training, managing and annotating our sequence data, logging the location and usage of reagents, managing orders - essentially creating one single platform to run all our day-to-day lab processes from. ### 6. So Easy and Convenient **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I have worked for many companies and they all use benchling, the best part is Benchling's versatility (i.e. designing plasmids, ELNs, SOPs) and its ease of use - it is very to use and learn it. It also helps that it is a website and not an app and can be accessed anywhere. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The downsides of benchling is sometimes it is unclear where the document is within projects. It sometimes is hard to organize documents within these subcategories. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is great for writing SOPs and ELNs, it also allows for the visualization of the gene of interest. This helps us design and organize experiments and give everyone in the organization access. ### 7. Very useful tool and so much more than just an online lab book! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling is very easy to use, with a lot of readily available online training courses and webinars. It's been great for everyday note taking, SOP writing and sample tracking. It makes sharing experimental details and lab notes simple across the organisation simple and user friendly. Benchling offers much more than being an electronic lab book. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Sometimes it can be a bit slow, specially when trying to upload gel images onto the notebook entry. The sequence data analysis feature is a bit basic, and doesn't let you link specific sequences to particular entities in your notebook entry. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling is currently looking in to implementing subtemplates, which makes writing templates for similar methodologies much easier as I can just re-use templates. ### 8. An user-friendly online labbook **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Pharmaceuticals | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** the user-friendly interface and the template tab makes easy and fast to keep record of the experiment. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** I can't think of any disadvatages. It would be great to have customisable tag/category for the template to simplify the search. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** it helps the whole organisation to standardise the lab notebook records across the world. ### 9. Useful tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling is a great resource, you can easily use it as an electronic lab book and auto-populate things like SOPs, while also updating procedures. It's a great way to keep track of work and the insights are very helpful for tracking changes. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Benchling isn't necessarily intuitive, it does take a while to get used to it. The training helps and time is important, you have to practice using it to really get the value out of it. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're able to use the same SOPs and keep track of any changes, it's great to have access to each others' workflows (as editor or reviewer) and we can keep track of things easily ### 10. I wish I had know about Benchling when I began my PhD a lifetime ago **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christoph G. | Founder and CEO at Unlocked Labs, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** All-in-one suite that is much more than electronic lab notebook or inventory **What do you dislike about Benchling?** It is a bit of a learning curve, but that is unavoidable for this much of an all-round solution **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Sharing information between team members effectively ### 11. Benchling allows you to structure data to save time and gain valuable insights. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James A. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 28, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling enables you to define a rich, biologically-aware data model, which connects to inventory, sample management, and structured electronic notebook entries. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Benchling has a good API and Python SDK, but lacks good documentation and does not have sufficient examples or guides for developers. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Tracking sample data and storing data in a structured way that can be easily analysed and visualised. ### 12. Engaged Customer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** George M. | Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2022 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The Registry system is an excellent tool for collecting characteristic data for sample lots, linking that information back to early discovery sequence data, and bringing that information into the ELN and Insights dashboards. We are getting a full view of individual sample lots and can also look at metrics in aggregate for pipeline QC. The Registry is very easy to configure and maintain. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** It's very pricey, particularly the Lab Automation module, and we have to watch how we use the different application licenses. The company also has preferred partners for specific support projects, like legacy data imports, and seems unable or unwilling to engage other service providers for those tasks. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are implementing a data tracking system end-to-end on a biologics discovery pipeline. Combined with equipment integrations and the development of data automation via their excellent API, we are automating nearly all data management processes and giving our scientists easy access to their assay results and linked entities. We are eliminating redundancy, increasing accuracy, and reducing errors caused by manual file management. ### 13. R&D Lab Notebook **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Helen G. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Lots of features, easy to connect all data to an entity **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Not the most user friendly, lots of features but difficult to find them **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** All data is consolidated onto 1 platform and is secure ### 14. Use benchling for tracking processes, inventory and insights. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Easy to use Lots of add on Great support team **What do you dislike about Benchling?** can't have tables >500 rows Sometimes work arounds are required - e.g. with containers. This can be tricky Easier way to add COSHH and RA **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** All documents in one place easy to control access and sharing of projects Tracking of metrics ### 15. Analytical chemists use it too **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** it's expandability to into other type of work within bio-investigative work **What do you dislike about Benchling?** learning curve is steep but worth it once you realize all its capable of doing for a team **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** connectivity among the team was a big issue. now visibility and connectivity is solved ### 16. Benchling Review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Its low learning curve and traceability of data. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** I don't like how it doesn't allow for easier use of mixture prep and recipes. That system needs to be overhauled. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Connecting large amounts of data and experiments across different teams ### 17. One regret is not getting it sooner. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Maddison M. | Master of Philosophy Student, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling has improved our cross-functional team collaboration, improving out overall R&D pipeline **What do you dislike about Benchling?** There's a lot of data entry and it's a steep learning curve initially. There also aren't many specific applications for product development (financial forecasting, or support with integrating into other software). **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mol Bio + lab automation workflows, cross functional workflows, transparency between teams, better collaboration and better sample tracking and data, results capture across the entire organisation. ### 18. Benchling provides a user-friendly ELN and inventory management solution that is easy to learn **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Benchling?** - Easy to learn - Clean user interface - Highly customizable **What do you dislike about Benchling?** - Non-HIPAA compliant subject data storage **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling provides a user-friendly ELN that is easy to complete and audit. ### 19. Great R&D cloud LIMS for start-ups **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joshua L. | Associate Director, Computational Biology , Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The registry system is quite easy to configure and maintain. It takes some of the pain out of schema migrations and all the Dev/Ops issues to maintain a database of your own for certain application stacks. If you use the registry as your primary data store, all the entities can be referenced in the notebook ELN tool. Customer service is excellent (they are highly responsive when issues arise and they always let you know whether something is possible or not to fix). The API can be used to hack together powerful synthetic biology workflows (far beyond what is achievable with the UI alone). For the most part, the documentation is excellent and the API is getting more performant over time. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** This software is a little pricey and so we have to be selective about which users can have access. The other thing is I wish it was easier to have a STAGE and PROD instance where the schemas, data, permissions, etc. are mirrored more regularly. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Take it slow during the onboarding process. You should expect to really invest some quality time to train your team members. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are building a synthetic biology R&D pipeline (especially on the DESIGN/BUILD side) using Benchling. ### 20. Intuitive, Fast, Effective **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zachary H. | Postdoctoral Researcher, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2020 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling has been quite intuitive for me to pick up; as an academic, the user interface is light-years ahead of other free-for-academic software (e.g. APE only lets you look at one strand at a time, and is clunky for identifying restriction sites). Being able to rapidly import other sequences from online databases and keep things in the cloud also make sharing constructs so much faster! **What do you dislike about Benchling?** No way to hide the cloning wizards from my undergrads :P **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Generating libraries of protein constructs to assay against fluorescent biosensors (or other reporter strains). ### 21. Great ELN and Bioregistry **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anna C. | Sr. Application Scientist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 20, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling is a modern cloud architecture and interface, as well as a continuously developing set of rich features around biologics workflows. The ELN is extremely flexible and interacts nicely with the bioregistry and inventory applications. We have successfully implimented Benchling's ELN and bioregistry across highly diverse teams and workflows, including NGS, pathology, in-vivo pharmacology, and cell engineering. Together with the more recent feature around regulated workflows, Benchling can comfortably accommodate research from early discovery to drug development, completely ad-hoc data entry to structured sample and result registration. Benchling's support, attention and responsiveness to user feedback has also been impressive. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** On occasion, the system can be too flexible and permissive making it challenging to implement best data governance practices. The inventory and requests modules are not as advanced as other Benchling applications. It may not be the best solution for highly structured, high volume data out of the box. Permissions on specific items are restricted to the project level, making project architecture complex and unintuitive. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** This is a highly versatile, reliable, and growing platform with a lot of potential. It will grow with your companys' needs. It may not be the best solution for highly structured, high volume data out of the box. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling is the corporate system of record for all research data and materials. ELN entries are the single source of company IP. We have implemented Benchling early to avoid any paper records within the research organization. ### 22. Benchling client from the beginning - 5+ years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhruv B. | IT - Scientific Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Ease of use, intuitive GUI, Bioregistry that is geared towards DNA based constructs, warehouse access that collects data behind the scenes, roadmap includes features that are pertinent to me, excellent support, all of my CSAs have been top notch **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Lack of GxP support at this time, built in analytics tool requires SQL knowledge **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Involve your CSA at the outset and follow best practices. For ELN, set up templates and structured data tables to systematically capture results. If you do not have an in house modeler, use Benchling professional services. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Bioregistry - registration of unique biological constructs Electronic Lab Notebook - record all experiments and results Requests - configure flexible requests and track progress of requests. Results are associated with requests Warehouse - with results from ELN being moved to the warehouse, create live dashboards Sample management - configure locations of freezers, liquid nitrogen tanks etc, with barcoding. Inventory management of samples and reagents **Official Response from Iris Fung:** > Thanks for your review and kind words Dhruv! We are reaching out to let you know that GxP support is now available, through Benchling Validated Cloud. Feel free to reach out to your support team to learn more how it might work with your use case. Thrilled to hear you're a long time user of Benchling! ### 23. User Friendly **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 06, 2022 **What do you like best about Benchling?** It allows to create entiries amd folder to store different experiments. It automatically generates ELN numbers and it also have location options where the box and samples would be stored for everyones reference therefore sample tracking is very easy. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The theme could be little more colorful for fun. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** I haven't used any other ELNs but Benchling is super friendly for anyone new. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Multiple people and edit in the same worksheet. ### 24. Highly configurable ELN/LIMS solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kathryn L. | Business Analyst II, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The system is so highly configurable it makes it very easy to fulfill the requirements of the business and end-users. We started using Benchling when they were a company of about 20 or so employees (like us at the time) and have helped them improve the platform and add additional modules. We have leveraged all of them as they all provide the functionality that we need as a business. The intuitive UI has helped with adoption vastly. We migrated from another ELN, a paper on glass solution, that was not searchable, reportable, or scalable; Benchling meets and exceeds all of these. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** They are deprecating some features like the workflows and batch schema that I have spent extensive time configuring for use. The large task of migrating over will require a whole day's stop of work and brute force effort to migrate to the new modules. I would much rather have liked to migrate without having to do each separately. It would also be more useful if the automation support were more aligned with the customer success support or implementation support instead of just as a support service. Companies like ours that lack an automation team, or a DevOps team at all, really can't utilize this service unless they (benchling) could more actively take a role in leading an automation project. i.e., determine the best system to automate, work to gather requirements and deliverables etc. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have streamlined the data capture within our culture process. Our process requires that service teams generate material for other groups, and they report on the phenotype and activity of the cellular material throughout the process, allowing us to determine whether to proceed with material generation and delivery or to stop. The ability to use workflows with stages makes those checkpoints more visible and manageable increasing throughput. The structured requesting module has also provided metrics to report on the workload and material generation for management to review. ### 25. useful for organization **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Variety of functions to keep organized, can share with others, very easy to use **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Because there are a lot of functions it takes a while to learn everything **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Able to share notes, data, training with people and for them to add to. ### 26. Benchling makes notebook entries easy and efficient **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Elizabeth K. | Research Scientist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The ease of use of Benchling as a whole. The Benchling notebook entry templates make it easy for creating standard protocols that are used often. The ability to link notebook entries, registry items and tag people in entries is also helpful for linking all protocols/items related to a specific experiment. The registry and inventory tables have helped us create and keep track of entity items that we are regularly generating (e.g. plasmids, IgG production). **What do you dislike about Benchling?** There are limitations to the functions that can be done in tables created in lab notebook entries (e.g. paste function from merged cells doesn't work, not as advance formula functions as Excel). As well, some of new features of Benchling have not been of use to us (e.g. Insights). Only downside of Benchling has been the fact that it is web browser based and a couple of times internet access has gone down at our workplace (or once there was an issue with AWS on Benchling's side) and we couldn't access any of our notebook entries/protocols, which inhibited us from doing any experiments for a short period of time (e.g. 1-2 hours). **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling has aided us in documenting our experiments, keeping tracking of our antibody production and lead candidate selection as part of our drug discovery efforts. ### 27. A User-centric electronic laboratory notebook system, and more **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jinwon J. | Principal scientist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling is one of the most flexible electronic lab notebook systems. It gives to users free writing capability as much as a paper-based notebook, while gives to admin solid integrity of records. It could also eliminate use of Excel file for a type of labnote book. Benchling allows the best traceability of record because it handles data and file as an 'entities' not just an unorganized characters. Therefore, while we write the ELN and capture the data, they are being organized for future. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** I hope Benchling will offer a more affordable price and price structure for a small start-up company. Their modules for the industry are hard to test-drive. It must be better if they operate a sandbox server for demonstration purposes to give a more clear idea of how the Benchling system works. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** If you want an easy transition and off-premise, zero-maintenance system, and excel replacement, Benchling is the solution you want. But it is only for biology, not for chemistry. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our scientists were writing their lab record in Excel files, but we also had to maintain paper-based lab notebook for recording purpose because an excel file could not give record integrity. Becuase of the situation, there were a tedious boring job of printing excel file and gluing them on the labnotebook. The physical notebook takes room for storage and requires additional management effort. By transition to ELN, all problems above have gone. Users were willing to use ELN because they easily transit from excel to ELN. ### 28. Great software for linking protocols, lab write-ups and registered sequences **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul I. | Scientist I, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The linking function for entries/entities which enables us to sequences of candidate molecules, cell lines for experiments, lab protocols, notebook entries etc. with ease. Also the timestamp function is very good to recover things is part of the entry was accidently overwritten and you need to go back and the ability to add people to edit your entry if they did part of an experiment without them needing to make a new entry is good. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Autofilling a whole row/column of a table would be useful so if you had your target cells in an assay plated in different columns of a 96 well plate and then you have your effector cells plated as different rows then it would be good to autofill each of these to enable efficient entry of these plating schemes. This would also be good for different concentrations of candidate molecules as well for example. The ability to enter multiple pieces of information efficiently into a 96 well plate without having to type each combination separately when you only have a few conditions in different combinations would be great. Also it would be good to have an alert system that a review has been open so long and requires closure soon and this to be set according to the company guidelines **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Consider if you have many different things that you need to trace because this will integrate them all together very well **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Traceability of lab work across teams in matrix environment. It houses the locations of our cell lines, donor information for human PBMCs etc. Sequencing information for our candidates for testing. This integration provides visibility to all aspects of the organisation. Molecular biology add-on is powerful and allows for bulk uploading of sequences.. ### 29. Efficiently condenses information **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Maureen N. | Scientist 2, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Everyone can see each others' entries, making it easy to share data/protocols. There are data tables that can be linked to specific entities, so if you need to know all data associated with a protein, you can find it in one location. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** It can be challenging to figure out how Benchling "likes" to receive information. If a field is rejected or if a table entry fails validation, it takes some clicking to understand how to fix it. Benchling also links to Protocols in a non-intuitive way, although my problem could probably be solved by creating an entry template and copying a protocol into the template to be filled out each time it is performed. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Benchling is a more coherent information management system than Excel. We previously organized information using Excel sheets on a shared server, and version control is horrendous. Just be sure to train everyone and mandate that everyone uses Benchling, or else it is not useful because the people who are good at updating information are hurt by others not using the tool! **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** The storage module is extremely useful. We can keep inventory and make sure we do not run out of protein. It is also useful for sample management. If we could combine Benchling with a scanner/barcode system, it would be a more powerful tool. ### 30. Benchling - a Modern Day ELN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 27, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** So easy to implement and customize to your exact needs and even easier to use **What do you dislike about Benchling?** not much! their customer team is quite young, so sometimes have slow response times **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling solves our previous problem of incongruous data spread out over various platforms (excel, Box, paper documents). The benefits are endless- managing experiments and data has never been easier! ### 31. Joining the Benchling environment was a great and seamless experience! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Diego V. | Director, Immunology, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The Benchling environment, the team and their approach to training new users. Benchling made the onboarding process fast, customized and seamless for our company. Being a biotechnology startup we look forward to using Benchling and benefiting from their platform tools. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Nothing to add here. The entire experience was seamless **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Go ahead and schedule a demo and a trial period. Their platform is a great way to keep teams ELNs organized and benefit from their multiple platform tools. A one-stop suite of options for any R&D team. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** ELN, team collaboration, data analysis, MolBio tools ### 32. Excellent all-in-one solution for biotech **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hannah T. | Director of Discovery, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling makes it really easy to share data between team members and across teams in a uniform format. The integration of molecular biology tools with the notebook and the ability to link samples and look at everywhere across Benchling where a particular sample has been mentioned is extremely powerful. Benchling's customer support is always helpful and they are continuously making improvements and rolling out new features. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Making changes to the data structure after it has been established is sometimes difficult. It would be nice if there was more flexibility in the types of linkages between different samples. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling helps us track sample provenance and manage a complex web of data. ### 33. Satisfied Benchling user **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The inventory is extremely useful to keep track of things. Its a single hub to do most things I require. Alignments, protein parameters, cloning etc **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Sometimes making multiple entities that require a lot of fields can be time consuming. Having an autofil option could be useful. Alignments of circular DNA with different indexation do not work well. No codon optimisation tool. Steep learning curve (although this is because it is quite good). **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is the best way I have found to manage my lab notes. Its very easy to track projects and go back to an old experiment. ### 34. Feature rich ELN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling starts as an ELN, but is also packed with features to make data management and experiments easier. It incorporates a registry, inventory system, molecular biology tools, and analytics all integrated into a single product. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** I wish I could double-click a column in a table to resize it to fit. In all seriousness, I wish I had the time to explore and take advantage of all the features Benchling includes. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling allows us to integrate multiple solutions into a single place, which means we can link and reference test articles with a direct connection to the registry. ### 35. Using Benchling to design and record my daily work **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** What I like best about Benchling is having one place to do everything. The Registry feature gives me quick access to all of the oligo and constructs that have been made by the group. Design and construction of plasmids is easy and as registries and feature libraries are added to labeling becomes a breeze. Another thing that I really like is the ELN feature where I can keep track of what I do day to day and set up individual notebook entries to follow the different work streams that I have. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** My biggest issue is that with the ELN is that you can only have people sign off on completed ELN notebooks that have full paid Benchling accounts.. this is an issue because in our company not everyone uses Benchling but legally I need someone from outside of my group to verify the work. When we initially were talking with Benchling it didn't seem like that was going to be the case. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** With using Benchling we are solving issues with Nomenclature of features. One benefit that I have realized is that with the search function I can check for oligos before just designing new ones. This saves us from duplicating things we already have. ### 36. Benchling works great! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I really like how benchling has the linking features- you can easily refer back to previous related experiments or link the protein complexes you have used in your experiments. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** This is a minor issue, but when you want to link to previous experiments you have to type "@experiment title" and it links the entire title. I wish there was an option to just link the experiment number rather than the entire title of the experiment. Other than that, I don't have any complaints. It works great! **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling enables us to keep track of experiments across multiple lab members. It is incredibly helpful when switching projects- no longer do you have to try and dig through old hard-copies of lab notebooks to see what the previous person working on the project had done. Instead you have an awesome search function and don't have to worry about not being able to read their handwriting. ### 37. Benchling is a Great Combination LIMS/ELN **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I find the electronic lab notebook (ELN) is very deep-featured and well-connected to the built-in LIMS system. The interconnected tracking between entries is very helpful as is the personnel tagging. We are a small (6 person) lab and find that the majority of the features are well-suited to us. Additionally, new features are always coming out and the customer support team is very responsive. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The inventory tracking and storage feature is not as clean/simple as the rest of the program, making it cumbersome to move vials virtually between containers. Also, the molecular bio suite could use better bulk extraction/exporting features in the DNA suite. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our lab requires Benchling to track our expression plasmids, batches of in-house produced IgGs, and small molecule drugs. The ELN also allows us to work collaboratively on projects and ensures that each member of the team has access to all experimental results and planning. ### 38. Overall pretty good, but not user friendly to cell culture. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** That Benchling is trying hard to tackle the very difficult problem of coming up with a good electronic lab notebook. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Plate to plate transfer tables are cumbersome, painful and take longer than the actual cell culture work. Should be a "drag and drop" feature, well to plate for example and increment passage... Difficult to distinguish titles in tabs for multiple experiments Often slow, long waits for pages to load, especially large pages Simple things like re-printing a barcodes are either incomplete in development or hidden within an edit field Search is painful, usually hard to find things if you don't know the exact title Errors are explained in data engineereese Webpages are not simplified visually More resources should be funneled into the cell culture side of their software, working directly with people in the field. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Seems like the only game in town, but they are always improving. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Good traceability. Some functions can save a lot of time. ### 39. very easy to use and the customer serves team is always ready to help! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aaron C. | Research Associate, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** very adaptable to the individual when something doesn't work **What do you dislike about Benchling?** navigation when first using it takes a while to learn is doing it by yourself **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Please take the time to really sit down and learn all that Benchling has to offer. Doing soo will greatly improve the overall use of the site! **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** This website solved an inventory problem, long with a notetaking problem. ### 40. No more paper labnotebooks **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** That is online, I can access it and write notes and paste results easily, Benchling is greatfor almost all mol bio applications I can imagine **What do you dislike about Benchling?** I don't like the error messages they stack on the screen and the fact that I cant check my calendar or pending actions on my phone The connection between the notes and the catalog of plasmids is not seamless, maybe adding links to my plasmids will make it easier(like html links) **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Confirming sequences (sanger to plasmids) is trivial, fast and we can store the data easily storing and recording data is easy ### 41. Benchling is the most intuitive scientific platform for users **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Intuitive interface Well documented API and warehouse Easily configurable **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The tool being so flexible, it's easy to over-engineer schemas and workflows. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data collection for scientific work Workflows in the lab, standardizing processes, centralization of data, sample management ### 42. User friendly, great way to collaborate and keep track of lab work **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling is constantly improving to cater to our labs needs, is user friendly, and easy to collaborate. It is catered exactly to what we need to use to make keeping track of data easy and integrated into our systems. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The folder organization is inconvenient (the way the notebook and inventory are organized), but that is due in part to the way our lab set up the projects. **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** Consider the functionality that you need for your lab and its size. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is easy to keep track of plates, especially in high throughput, and stay organized with large numbers of samples. ### 43. Great software for genetics and protein engineering work **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 07, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Intuitive interface for managing DNA sequences and protocols **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The built-in LIMS system is not very intuitive **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Protein design and engineering ### 44. Benchling review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amy K. | Scientist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Almost all the molecular biology information I need is in one location. It also updates when other people make changes. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Does not give percent identity for DNA alignment. It cannot handle large data inputs. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have used Benchling to store data from multiple scientists and update it in real time. ### 45. Benchling aids in experimental design **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin T. | Research Associate III, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Benchling helps in storing all the data in one central location and how you can design Benchling to fit your needs. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Benchling currently does not have visual capabilities. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchling increases efficiency in experimental design. Everyone has access to everything, and the information is stored in a central location. ### 46. The best web app I know for editing genetic constructs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** The sequence editor and annotator, with support for shared feature libraries **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The poor support for implementing external analysis pipelines **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Construction of synthetic DNA sequences. The main benefit is that notebooks can contain link to sequences or other entities (batches, bacterial strains etc). ### 47. efficient **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** organized and able to get information fast **What do you dislike about Benchling?** it only lets export 25 entities at a time **Recommendations to others considering Benchling:** we still can't print and also still don't have an inventory set up **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps keep all of our data in one place. ### 48. NEED A LOT MORE DEVELOPMENT **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 20, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I like that it has ARCHIVES, history, cloud-based **What do you dislike about Benchling?** registration tables, transgfer tables, lack of structure (it is a plane white sheet with limited text editing capacity), the storage system is too complicated for something that is designed for research lab not for GMP! it is not flexible enough I hate all the tables... the way they look like and structured **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** easily accessible from multiple laptops in the lab, ### 49. Benchling generally easy to use, has some UX quirks that can be difficult to work with **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** Generally friendly, easy to keep inventory and entries organized. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** Some inventory things cache slowly, sometimes difficult to figure things out for new users. As features change, the experience changes which can be confusing, especially with inventory related fields. **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lab work storage. Generally easy & efficient, especially with templates ### 50. its an okay service **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Benchling?** I can take notes in it, but that's honestly the most robust part of the platform. **What do you dislike about Benchling?** The Sanger sequencing alignment algorithms are trash **What problems is Benchling solving and how is that benefiting you?** The global energy crisis ## Benchling Discussions - [Does Benchling have an app?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/does-benchling-have-an-app) - [How do you use Benchling software?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-you-use-benchling-software) - [How good is Benchling?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-good-is-benchling) - [What can Benchling do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-can-benchling-do) - [View Benchling pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/benchling/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-04+05%3A48%3A50+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e59000b2-d6ef-4677-9069-640f491dc322&secure%5Btoken%5D=e204fb936de74813c65a000b314f836ce9cc305fd0a5d5a938b60fcb759045d2&format=llm_user) ## Benchling Features **Process** - Data Storage - Inventory Management - Protocol Templates - Intellectual Protection and Compliance - Comprehensive Search Functionality - Data Access Authorization **Lab Informatics** - Instrument Management - ELN Support - Workflow Management - Billing Management **Data Management** - Document Management System - Lab Systems Integration - Operational Database - Query and Search - Audit Security - Variety File Support - Library Collections - Metadata Management **Chain of Custody** - Sample Management - Data Warehouse - Inventory Management - Document Management - QA/QC **Agentic AI - Scientific Data Management System (SDMS)** - Cross-system Integration - Decision Making **Agentic AI - LIMS** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Decision Making ## Top Benchling Alternatives - [SciNote](https://www.g2.com/products/scinote/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (303 reviews) - [Labguru ELN LIMS](https://www.g2.com/products/labguru-eln-lims/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (165 reviews) - [Thermo Scientific SampleManager LIMS Software](https://www.g2.com/products/thermo-scientific-samplemanager-lims-software/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (108 reviews)