Benchling Reviews

I have worked for many companies and they all use benchling, the best part is Benchling's versatility (i.e. designing plasmids, ELNs, SOPs) and its ease of use - it is very to use and learn it. It also helps that it is a website and not an app and can be accessed anywhere.

The downsides of benchling is sometimes it is unclear where the document is within projects. It sometimes is hard to organize documents within these subcategories.

It is great for writing SOPs and ELNs, it also allows for the visualization of the gene of interest. This helps us design and organize experiments and give everyone in the organization access.

All-in-one suite that is much more than electronic lab notebook or inventory

It is a bit of a learning curve, but that is unavoidable for this much of an all-round solution

Sharing information between team members effectively

Setting up new entity schemas and templates for users is super fast, thanks largely to the easy to use interface, and the great selection of built-in entities to choose from (dropdowns, dates, Sequence data etc). This allows us to very quickly set up new classes of data, and new types of document. The flexibility this comes with allows us to store a great variety of data within benchling, so we can have everything organized in one place.

The most obvious struggle with benchling is transferring objects from the test instance of benchling, to the live instance. Though it is great that these 2 instances are kept totally seperate, it does mean that I am repeating the process of object setup everytime I want to create a new entity schema or notebook template etc. Some mechanism to download finished objects from test and upload to live would save so much time and human error. additionally There are still some niche functionalities that would be useful for us, such as linking out to internal web-apps.

Taking lab documents (such as risk assessments and SOPs) online, recording training, managing and annotating our sequence data, logging the location and usage of reagents, managing orders - essentially creating one single platform to run all our day-to-day lab processes from.

Easy to use

Lots of add on

Great support team

can't have tables >500 rows

Sometimes work arounds are required - e.g. with containers. This can be tricky

Easier way to add COSHH and RA

All documents in one place

easy to control access and sharing of projects

Tracking of metrics

Benchling has improved our cross-functional team collaboration, improving out overall R&D pipeline

There's a lot of data entry and it's a steep learning curve initially. There also aren't many specific applications for product development (financial forecasting, or support with integrating into other software).

Mol Bio + lab automation workflows, cross functional workflows, transparency between teams, better collaboration and better sample tracking and data, results capture across the entire organisation.

The Registry system is an excellent tool for collecting characteristic data for sample lots, linking that information back to early discovery sequence data, and bringing that information into the ELN and Insights dashboards. We are getting a full view of individual sample lots and can also look at metrics in aggregate for pipeline QC. The Registry is very easy to configure and maintain.

It's very pricey, particularly the Lab Automation module, and we have to watch how we use the different application licenses. The company also has preferred partners for specific support projects, like legacy data imports, and seems unable or unwilling to engage other service providers for those tasks.

We are implementing a data tracking system end-to-end on a biologics discovery pipeline. Combined with equipment integrations and the development of data automation via their excellent API, we are automating nearly all data management processes and giving our scientists easy access to their assay results and linked entities. We are eliminating redundancy, increasing accuracy, and reducing errors caused by manual file management.

Benchling has been quite intuitive for me to pick up; as an academic, the user interface is light-years ahead of other free-for-academic software (e.g. APE only lets you look at one strand at a time, and is clunky for identifying restriction sites). Being able to rapidly import other sequences from online databases and keep things in the cloud also make sharing constructs so much faster!

No way to hide the cloning wizards from my undergrads :P

Generating libraries of protein constructs to assay against fluorescent biosensors (or other reporter strains).

It allows to create entiries amd folder to store different experiments. It automatically generates ELN numbers and it also have location options where the box and samples would be stored for everyones reference therefore sample tracking is very easy.

The theme could be little more colorful for fun.

I haven't used any other ELNs but Benchling is super friendly for anyone new.

Multiple people and edit in the same worksheet.

So easy to implement and customize to your exact needs and even easier to use

not much! their customer team is quite young, so sometimes have slow response times

Benchling solves our previous problem of incongruous data spread out over various platforms (excel, Box, paper documents). The benefits are endless- managing experiments and data has never been easier!

The inventory is extremely useful to keep track of things.

Its a single hub to do most things I require. Alignments, protein parameters, cloning etc

Sometimes making multiple entities that require a lot of fields can be time consuming. Having an autofil option could be useful.

Alignments of circular DNA with different indexation do not work well.

No codon optimisation tool.

Steep learning curve (although this is because it is quite good).

It is the best way I have found to manage my lab notes. Its very easy to track projects and go back to an old experiment.