AI-Powered Lab Notebook for Researchers — Free & Open Source
A modern, privacy-first electronic lab notebook designed for PhD students, postdocs, and research scientists. All data stored locally in your browser — no cloud, no subscriptions, no data harvesting.
Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) are failing researchers. A 2026 survey found that scientists view existing ELNs as "glorified filing cabinets" that cause:
- Experiment duplication (wasting months of work)
- Workflow bottlenecks
- Shadow AI use (researchers secretly using ChatGPT because their ELN is useless)
OpenLab is different:
- 🏠 Offline-first — All data in localStorage, works without internet
- 🤖 AI-ready — Connect your own OpenAI/Claude API key for research assistance
- 📋 Structured experiments — Hypothesis, protocol, variables, observations, results
- 📤 Export anywhere — JSON, Markdown, or Print to PDF
- 🔒 Privacy-first — Your data never leaves your machine
- 💰 Free forever — MIT licensed, no premium tiers
- Experiment management with status tracking
- Step-by-step protocol builder
- Variables & controls table (Independent, Dependent, Control, Confounding)
- Real-time observation logging
- Results & analysis section
- References & citations
- Statistics dashboard
- Full-text search
- AI research assistant panel (BYOK — Bring Your Own Key)
- Export to JSON, Markdown, or PDF
- Open
index.htmlin any browser - Start creating experiments
- That's it. No signup, no install, no server.
- Get an API key from OpenAI or Anthropic
- Click the AI panel settings
- Paste your key
- Ask questions about your experiments
- GitHub Pages: Push to repo → Settings → Pages → Deploy from main
- Vercel: Connect repo → Auto-deploy
- Local: Just open index.html
MIT — Do whatever you want with it.
Built with 💙 by Demaciains