A lab notebook connected to your images, flow, and samples

LabArchives does what an ELN is supposed to do, and its institutional adoption is a real strength. The limit is what the notebook connects to. It holds text and file attachments, so the record of an experiment is a description of the analysis rather than the analysis itself. The images, the flow data, and the figures live in other tools, and the notebook points at exported copies of them.

In Conspecta, a note links to the actual images, flow runs, samples, and figures it's about, and the image analysis and flow cytometry run in the same platform. You don't attach an exported plot to a protocol, you link the protocol to the analysis that produced it. Open the note later and the live data is one click away, not a stale PDF from six months ago.

The clearest difference is that the record and the work aren't separate. A sample links to the notes that describe it and the analysis that used it, so a protocol, the flow run it applied to, and the figure that came out of it sit together. There's less copying between tools, and less chance the notebook drifts out of date as the underlying data changes. LabArchives is the notebook in the Dotmatics suite, and the analysis it would point to lives in separate products, OMIQ or FCS Express for flow, Prism for figures, each licensed on its own.

In practice that means fewer stale attachments. You aren't re-exporting a result every time you update it and swapping the file in the notebook, so the record stays in step with the experiment.

Moving over is mostly a one-time step. You start writing in the block editor and linking notes to the samples and analysis they describe, with nothing to install. Your notebook and data export in open formats, so records are never locked in. If your university already standardizes on LabArchives for compliance, it's fine to keep it there and use Conspecta where connected analysis matters.