Indigo ELN vs RSpace

Indigo ELN is a free electronic lab notebook for creating, storing, retrieving, and sharing chemistry records. It organizes work into projects, notebooks, experiments, and components, while allowing experiment templates and added components without changing the core code. Ketcher provides chemical structure editing, and Indigo handles reaction rendering and chemical property calculations. Searches can use entity attributes, or product structures and reaction schemes with BingoDB integration. APIs connect customer services, databases, and electronic signature services. Role-based authorities and access control lists govern projects, notebooks, and experiments. Pages can be printed to PDF, and SDF files can be imported or exported. The system runs on the web and can be self-hosted; the maker says a Docker image is available, with documented local Docker and AWS deployment. The core product is free under GNU GPL version 3 and provided without warranty. EPAM offers paid customization, integration, support, and maintenance. The demo environment is unavailable while work continues toward a public version 3.0 environment.

RSpace is an open-source electronic research notebook and research data management platform for research workflows. Its web application supports real-time collaboration, granular sharing controls, comments and annotations, with full-text and metadata search. Chemistry teams can draw compounds and calculate stoichiometry for reaction planning, while RSpace Inventory tracks samples alongside notebook documentation. Forms provide structured fields and ontology integration for FAIR metadata. Records can be exported as HTML, XML, PDF, DOC, JSON and RO-Crate. A RESTful API supports custom integrations. RSpace states that data is encrypted at rest and over networks and supports 21 CFR Part 11 and GLP. Research Space identifies ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification. Deployment can be self-installed, managed in a private AWS instance, or run on premises for Enterprise. Plans include a free open-source option, Team plans at $6,000 a year and $12,000 a year, and Enterprise at $34,000 a year.