Free sample tracking software: the honest list.

“Free sample tracking software” means one of three things, and each one has a different catch class. Knowing which class you are choosing matters more than which product you pick inside it.

A free tier of a commercial toolcosts nothing until you cross a printed limit — samples, users, features. The catch is the limit, and the vendor’s business model is you outgrowing it. Ours included.

Open-source software is free to run forever, with every feature. The catch moved: you supply the server, the TLS certificate, the backups, the upgrades and the person who fixes it. The licence is free; the IT department is you.

A template is a file. It costs nothing and never will. The catch is discipline: nothing records who and when unless someone types it, and a template cannot make anyone type it.

One more thing before the list. If you landed here because a LIMS quote scared you, first check whether you need a LIMS at all — most labs under 20 people do not, and the answer changes which class below is even relevant.

Three that we could verify on the vendors’ own sites on 2026-08-14: tinysamples — ours, free for 100samples — Benchling’s free academic plan, and SciNote Free. Quartzy, which comes up in every search for free lab software, has no free plan. Each catch is printed below.

tinysamples is ours, so it goes first and its catch gets printed first. Free is 1 workspace, 100 samples and 1 user — no card, no time limit. The catch: past 100 samples, unlimited is $12 a month, and a lab of up to 20 is $29 flat. We make money when you outgrow the free tier. That is the whole model, and this list exists because we would rather say so than hide it.

Benchling has a free academic plan covering its Notebook and Molecular Biology tools, which is a lot of real software for $0. The catch for this article: Inventory and Registry — the parts that actually track samples — are not part of the free academic plan, and paid pricing is custom quotes, not a price list.

SciNote has a free plan for its cloud ELN, and the platform includes lab inventory management. The catch: their own site pitches the free account at people who work alone as individual users, and paid plan prices are not published — the route to a number is a demo call.

Quartzy is here so you can stop looking: no free plan is listed on their pricing page. Academia is $50 a month for 3 users, billed annually. It is also an ordering and reagent-inventory tool, not a tracker for the samples your lab makes.

Two that we verified as live, licensed and genuinely free on 2026-08-14: eLabFTW and openBIS. Both are complete — no paywalled features — and both carry the same catch: you install them on a server you own, and you maintain that server for as long as your samples matter.

eLabFTWis an ELN plus lab inventory — plasmids, antibodies, cell lines, storage locations — released under the AGPLv3, and its site states plainly that no features sit behind a paywall. The catch, in their own documentation’s words: it should be installed, configured and maintained by a systems administrator. Paid hosting exists via Deltablot, which is exactly the moment it stops being free.

openBIS is developed at ETH Zurich, under active development since 2007, Apache 2.0 licensed, and combines a data-management platform, an ELN and an inventory system. Same catch: you host it, and it is built as a full institutional data platform, so budget setup time to match.

Open source is the right answer when your institution already has the server and the person. It is the wrong answer when “the person” is a postdoc who leaves in 18 months and takes the root password with them.

When one person owns the samples, the count stays in the hundreds, and nobody else needs to edit. A sheet with a permanent ID, an owner, a location and an append-only log genuinely covers that — we publish a free sample tracking spreadsheet template for exactly this, no email gate.

The catch is the discipline class from the top of this page. A spreadsheet does not break at a sample count; it breaks at handoffs — two people editing at once, or you at the -80 with gloves on while the file sits open at your desk. Until those happen, the template is not a compromise. It is the correct tool.

Pick by catch class, not by feature list: limits you can price, a server you must staff, or discipline you must keep.

Every row above is a real answer for some lab. The honest move is matching the catch you can live with, and the free options make that a cheap experiment: every one of them lets you start today with a real sample and $0.