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!

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.

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.