Indigo ELN vs Signals Notebook

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.

Signals Notebook is a cloud-based electronic laboratory notebook for capturing, organizing, and sharing research data. It is presented for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, materials, and food, flavor, and fragrance teams. Experiment records support flexible templates, rich text, embedded media, folders, tags, full-text search, automatic versioning, and audit trails. Native ChemDraw integration handles stoichiometry and searches by CAS number, structure, or name, with PubChem safety information. Teams can share notebooks, comment, review and approve entries with electronic signatures, receive notifications, and apply granular permissions. Named connections include Spotfire, Signals DLX instrument capture, inventory management, and open APIs for LIMS, ERP, and other systems. The product describes 21 CFR Part 11 support, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 security programs, encryption, multifactor authentication, and automated backups. It runs in browsers on web, macOS, Windows, and API environments.