eLabFTW is a free, open-source electronic lab notebook for research teams. See 2026 self-hosting details, PRO support and hosting pricing, and top alternatives.
eLabFTW is a free, open-source electronic lab notebook that lets research teams document experiments, track samples and reagents, and keep a timestamped, auditable record of lab work. It was created by Nicolas Carpi at the Institut Curie in Paris and first released around 2012.
The project grew from a personal tool into one of the most widely used open-source ELNs in academic research, leading Carpi to found Deltablot SASU in 2019 to provide professional support and managed hosting around the free software.
The platform combines an experiments module, where researchers write rich-text protocols and results that can be locked and timestamped for reproducibility, with a database/inventory module for cataloging samples, reagents, and equipment using custom metadata fields. Entries can be cross-linked, tagged, and exported for sharing or archival.
eLabFTW supports electronic signatures, detailed audit logs, and version history to help labs meet compliance needs such as ISO 17025 or good laboratory practice. It is deployed via Docker for straightforward self-hosting and is released under the AGPL, ensuring the code stays open even when run as a hosted service.
The core software is completely free with no features behind a paywall; any lab that self-hosts eLabFTW gets the full feature set at no cost under the AGPL license.
Deltablot monetizes optional services: PRO Support starts from EUR 760 per year for direct engineering help with self-hosted instances, PRO Hosting offers fully managed cloud deployment in Europe, the US, or Asia at custom pricing, and PRO Hosting SecNumCloud, at EUR 6,985 per year, provides compliance-grade hosting exclusively in France for organizations with strict data-sovereignty needs.
Yes. eLabFTW is open source under the AGPL and can be self-hosted with the full feature set at no cost. Paid tiers only cover optional professional support and managed hosting.
eLabFTW was created by Nicolas Carpi, a research engineer at the Institut Curie in Paris, who first released it around 2012 and later founded Deltablot SASU in 2019 to support it commercially.
PRO Support, starting from EUR 760 per year, gives self-hosting institutions direct access to Deltablot's engineering team for troubleshooting, upgrades, and configuration assistance.
It is a compliance-grade managed hosting tier, priced at EUR 6,985 per year, hosted exclusively in France with encryption at rest and infrastructure aligned to strict French and EU security and data-sovereignty standards.
eLabFTW is released under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), which requires that modifications remain open source even when the software is offered as a network service.
Academic research groups, university core facilities, biotech and pharmaceutical R&D teams, and government research institutions that need auditable, reproducible documentation of experimental work.