RSpace review
An open-source ELN with chemical tools, inventory, audit trails, and API access.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
RSpace is an electronic lab notebook for research organisations, laboratories, principal investigators, and research data managers. Its collaborative notebooks support granular sharing and commenting, while templates, forms, snippets, and structured metadata help organise experimental records. Chemical structure drawing, search, and calculations, along with sample and inventory management, extend its scope beyond basic note-taking. RSpace is available as an open-source platform, managed cloud service, or enterprise deployment, including on-premises installation.
The published plans show annual flat subscriptions differentiated by academic and commercial use. Team — Academia costs $5,000 per year and includes a managed instance of open-source RSpace, a private AWS instance, and basic training and support. Team — Commercial costs $10,000 per year with the same listed highlights. Enterprise — Academia and Enterprise — Commercial each cost $29,000 per year and add tailored deployment, SSO through SAML2 and LDAP, premium support, and onboarding. There is no free plan, so RSpace is aimed at organisations budgeting for a paid team or enterprise deployment rather than individual users seeking a no-cost notebook.
For controlled research records, RSpace brings electronic signing and witnessing, full audit trails with timestamps and record changes, versioning, revision history, and full-text and metadata search. Exports include HTML, XML, PDF, DOC, JSON, and RO-Crate. Integrations cover Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Office 365, protocols.io, GitHub, Figshare, Dataverse, ChemDraw, and Jupyter Notebook, while the REST API supports programmatic search, review, retrieval, and export. Choose RSpace when open-source deployment, collaboration, chemical workflows, and structured research data are central requirements. Teams seeking a free plan or a lower-cost individual notebook should look elsewhere.
RSpace pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Open-source platform with managed cloud and self-hosted deployment options
- Chemical tools, inventory management, metadata, versioning, and audit trails
- REST API plus integrations with research, storage, and collaboration tools
- Where it doesn't
- No free plan; published subscriptions start at $5,000 per year
- Enterprise plans cost $29,000 per year
- Advanced deployment and support features are reserved for Enterprise plans
RSpace fact sheet, pricing and score →
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