SLIM / Compare
Compare
Nine options including ours and including the one most labs actually use. Prices are annual and assume a ten-person laboratory where a per-seat product would charge for ten.
| Product | Licence | 10-person lab | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| SLIM | Flat, per lab | €1,920 / year | Notebook wired into inventory, protocols, equipment and tasks. Physical tags. Migration included. |
| ELabELN | Flat, per lab | $7,080 / year | The other flat-rate option. Add-on apps priced separately. |
| Benchling | Per seat, opaque | From ~$15,000 / year | Deep molecular biology tooling. Built for biotech, priced for it. |
| QBench | Per seat | $4,500 / user / year | Strong on workflow and API. Expensive for a whole group. |
| Labii | Per seat, tiered | $479-959 / user / year | Cheapest per-seat option, still several times a flat fee for a lab. |
| LabArchives | Per seat, institutional | Quoted | The academic incumbent. Notebook only, widely accepted. |
| SciNote | Free tier, then per seat | Free / quoted | EU built, open-source core. Good free tier for individuals. |
| Quartzy | Free for academia | $0 | Inventory and ordering only. No notebook. |
| A shared spreadsheet | Already paid for | $0 | Free, familiar, and the thing that actually wins most of these decisions. |
Start with the thing you are trying to stop happening. If it is a person leaving and taking the knowledge with them, you want a notebook that references real records, and that narrows the field fast. If it is ordering a reagent you already had, you want inventory with alerting and you may not need a notebook at all, in which case Quartzy is free and good. If it is a reviewer asking how a result was produced, you want protocol versioning that does not rewrite history.
Then look at the licence model, because it decides who in your lab gets an account. Per-seat products quietly encourage you to buy fewer seats than you have people, and the record is incomplete from that moment on.
Most labs are not choosing between two vendors. They are choosing between a vendor and the spreadsheet they already have, which is free, familiar and works well enough until the day it does not. Any honest comparison has to put it in the table, so we did.
Figures from public sources and vendor pages, last checked September 2026. Competitor prices are shown in US dollars, as their vendors publish them. SLIM is billed in euros; the figure shown is annual billing.
Send us a spreadsheet before the call. We build your inventory from it, show you around it live, and you keep it whether you continue or not.