eLabFTW

Is eLabFTW actively maintained?

Over the last 11 months the project absorbed 804 commits, of which 334 arrived in the most recent quarter — roughly 111 commits a month.

Activity is accelerating: the last quarter carried 94% more commits than the one before it.

The most recent tagged release, 6.1.0-alpha, shipped within the last month — a current, installable version exists today.

Of the 48 projects we track in Content Management Systems (CMS), eLabFTW ranks #8 by health score — in the top quarter of its category.

What eLabFTW actually does

eLabFTW is an electronic lab notebook designed for research facilities to document experiments, maintain databases of reagents and protocols, and handle legal timestamping. Users can export records to PDF or zip archives and collaborate with colleagues on scientific data. It is an open-source tool built with PHP and licensed under the AGPL-3.0.

Best fit: Research laboratories and academic teams that need a self-hosted platform to organise experiments and manage inventory with strict data ownership.

Worth knowing: The AGPL-3.0 licence carries strong copyleft implications if you modify and network the software, which may conflict with strict institutional compliance policies. It also overlaps with generic wiki or document management tools, meaning adoption depends on how well it fits existing laboratory workflows.

Deployment notes

As a PHP-based application, it typically requires a web server like Nginx or Apache, a separate SQL database backend, and persistent storage for uploaded files and documents. You will also need to configure a reverse proxy to handle TLS termination securely.

Links

• Official website
• Source code
• Live demo