Why “elabFTW is free” is the wrong question

Sooner or later, someone evaluating Archon asks the fair question: “eLabFTW is free and self-hosted too — why would we pay for this?” It’s a good question, and the honest answer isn’t a feature comparison. It’s that “free” is the wrong axis to compare on for the specific decision most labs are actually facing.

The free tools are good — that’s not in question

eLabFTW and the other open-source, self-hostable electronic lab notebooks are legitimately good software, built by people who understand what a lab needs. If your laboratory just needs a notebook — a place to record experiments, attach files, and keep a history — one of them is very likely the right choice, and there’s no shame in not paying for something you don’t need. We built Archon’s Community tier on the same premise: a full ELN, a tamper-evident audit chain, and e-signatures, free and unlimited, permanently, with no research cap and no seat limit. If that’s all a lab needs, that’s what it should use — including, quite literally, the free tier of this product.

The question changes the day an assessor is coming

The comparison stops being about notebooks the moment a laboratory has an actual accreditation obligation on the calendar — an ISO/IEC 17025 surveillance visit, a funder requiring ALCOA+ data integrity, a sponsor asking about 21 CFR Part 11. At that point the requirement isn’t “do we have a notebook.” It’s: can we show an external assessor, on a specific day, that our records are complete and unaltered — and can we do that without a week of someone’s time spent manually assembling evidence from screenshots and exported PDFs?

That’s a narrower, harder problem, and it’s the one the paid tiers exist to solve:

• Readiness computed from live data, not a checklist. A percentage someone filled in from memory the week before a visit is a claim. A score derived on demand from what’s actually in the database is evidence.
• One-click evidence packs and chain verification. The tamper-evident audit chain (see the previous post) is free on every tier — what’s paid is the tooling that turns it into something an assessor can pick up and check in the room, instead of a compliance officer querying a database by hand.
• A named support contact who knows the deployment, for laboratories whose software is itself under qualification and can’t afford to be debugging a support ticket while an assessor waits.

What you’re actually paying for

Not the notebook. The notebook — including the audit chain and electronic signatures — is free and permanent on Community, and stays that way regardless of whether a licence is ever purchased. What’s priced is the machinery that turns “we have records” into “here is the evidence, already assembled, ready for an assessor.” That’s a narrow, specific thing to sell, and it shows up in how it’s priced: Professional is $3,000 per laboratory per year, fixed — small enough, on purpose, to buy without three rounds of procurement, and priced per laboratory rather than per person, because rationing who gets a login before an audit is exactly the wrong incentive. Accredited starts from $12,000/year for the labs whose software, not just their procedures, is what’s being qualified. The full breakdown is on the pricing page, along with the sentence that actually decides which tier is yours: Professional is for when your laboratory is assessed, Accredited is for when your software is assessed.