FOR SMALL LABS

Your lab outgrew the spreadsheet. It didn't need a LIMS.

Between "a shared spreadsheet" and "a validated enterprise LIMS with a sales call and a per-seat invoice" there's almost nothing built for a lab of 1 to 10 people. LimsRat is that middle option — it just runs in your browser.

Where the spreadsheet actually breaks

Every small lab starts on a shared spreadsheet, and every small lab eventually hits the same wall. It's rarely one dramatic failure — it's a slow accumulation of small ones that make the sheet actively unsafe to rely on.

·Two people edit the same row at once and one edit silently wins — nothing tells you a conflict happened

·There's no audit trail — you can't tell who changed a status or when a location moved

·Nothing reminds anyone that a reagent or sample is approaching its expiry date

·Finding one sample by ID means Ctrl-F across a sheet with a thousand rows and five renamed tabs

·The version everyone's editing lives in someone's email thread as "final_v3_ACTUAL.xlsx"

What LimsRat does instead

It's the same job a lab notebook and a spreadsheet were already doing — log a sample, track where it is, know its status — done by software actually built for that job.

·Every sample has an append-only, field-level audit log — nobody has to ask who changed what

·A Kanban board and workflow map show every sample's stage at a glance, not buried in a status column

·A freezer map and expiry banners flag what's about to expire before it becomes a problem

·Scan a QR code from a phone browser to log or look up a sample — no app install for the person at the bench

·Search by ID, status, location, or tag returns instantly — no Ctrl-F required

Why it doesn't need a server

Most LIMS products are priced and built for labs much larger than this one — hosted infrastructure, per-seat licensing, an implementation call before you can even see the product. A 3-person research lab doesn't need any of that, and shouldn't have to pay for it.

LimsRat runs entirely in the browser. Sample data lives in your browser's local storage, and optionally mirrors to a folder on your own disk as plain JSON files — readable by anything, forever, even without LimsRat. Devices sync directly with each other over WebRTC, the same peer-to-peer technology behind video calls, so there's no vendor-held copy of your lab's data sitting on a server somewhere.

Get started

Free for a lab syncing up to 5 devices — unlimited samples, unlimited workflows, no account required. Open it and start logging samples in under a minute, or bring your existing spreadsheet with CSV import.

Open LimsRat

Next: see the pricing, or read how LimsRat compares to a spreadsheet.