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 |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |