Vivarium Management Software: What It Does and How to Choose
Summary
Vivarium management software is the shared system an animal facility uses to track animals, cages, racks and rooms, plan daily husbandry work, follow protocols and bill housing back to research teams. This guide covers what it does, who uses it, and what to check before you choose one.
Colony.care is vivarium management software for research teams and animal facilities. It runs in the browser, every cage card carries a QR code that opens the live record on a phone, and a team signs up and starts on its own, with nothing to install.
What Vivarium Management Software Does
It replaces the spreadsheets, paper cage cards and whiteboards of an animal facility with one record that the whole team reads and updates. The usual scope:
- Census and housing: every animal, cage, rack and room, with occupancy against capacity.
- Breeding: pairs, litters, weaning dates and pedigrees.
- Health and procedures: clinical cases, follow-ups, surgery and necropsy records.
- Daily work: husbandry checklists, work requests and alerts for what is due.
- Protocols and compliance: animals linked to approved protocols, and an audit trail of every change.
- Billing: per diem charges calculated from the daily census.
Who Uses It on a Team
- Animal care technicians update records at the cage during rounds and work through the day's checklist.
- Facility managers follow capacity, assign work and produce the charges for each research team.
- Principal investigators and research staff plan breeding, follow their cohorts and see what their animals cost.
- Veterinarians open clinical cases and record the follow-ups.
Vivarium Management and Colony Management: The Same Software?
The two terms name the same category from two seats. Colony management is the researcher's term: breeding, genotypes and the animals of one project. Vivarium management is the facility's term: rooms, capacity, husbandry and billing across every project. A team needs both in one system, because the lab and the facility are looking at the same cages. Colony.care covers both as one lab animal colony management software; the researcher's side is described in what colony management software is.
What to Check Before You Choose
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Can the whole team use it from the first day? | Software that takes weeks of training ends up used by two people, and everyone else goes back to the spreadsheet. |
| Does it work at the cage, on a phone? | Records stay current when an update takes seconds at the rack instead of waiting for a desk. |
| Which species and housing types does it cover? | A facility with mice, zebrafish and rabbits should not need three tools. |
| Is the price published? | A public price lets you build a budget before the first sales call. |
| Can you bring your data in and take it out? | Import moves your current records in. Export keeps them yours. |
| Does it record who changed what, and when? | An audit trail answers an inspector's question without a search through paper. |
How Colony.care Handles It
Colony.care is a new tool, built so that a team can start working in it the day it signs up.
- Self-serve start: create an account, add a project and import your records from a CSV file, with column mapping, a preview and a rollback.
- QR code cage cards: printed from the browser and scanned with any phone, with no extra hardware.
- 25 species: cage-housed mammals, birds, tank-housed fish and amphibians, and social insects, across 4 reproduction models.
- Team work in one place: husbandry checklists, work requests, and alerts for weaning and other due dates.
- The facility side: occupancy per cage, rack and room, and per diem billing from the daily census. See Colony.care for animal facilities.
- Compliance: animals linked to protocols, an audit trail kept indefinitely, and electronic signatures.
- For institutions: SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning and a REST API.
- Two languages: the full interface in English and French.
The Starter plan is free for one project and up to 100 animals. The Lab plan is CA$549.99 per month with unlimited animals and 10 projects, and it starts with a 14-day free trial. See the plans.
Getting a Team Started
- Create an account and a first project.
- Export your current spreadsheet as CSV, import it and check the preview.
- Print QR code cage cards for one room and scan them on the next round.
- Invite the team and give each person a role.
The full walkthrough is in switching from Excel to colony management software.
FAQ
Do we need special hardware?
No. Cage cards print on a standard printer and scan with a phone camera. Colony.care is used in a web browser on a computer, tablet or phone.
Can a facility bill several research teams?
Yes. Rates are set per cage type and billing period, and the charges come out per team from the daily census. The method is explained in the per diem billing guide.
Is it hosted or installed on our servers?
Colony.care is cloud software. There is no on-premise version.
How much does vivarium management software cost?
Prices range from free plans to institutional contracts. The cost guide lists what vendors publish.
What an institution sees across all its teams is described in colony management for core facilities and multi-lab organizations.