Colony.care vs Benchling for Animal Colony Management
Summary
Benchling is a cloud-based platform for biotech R&D: a collaborative notebook, a registry for modelling scientific entities, automated workflows, and Benchling In Vivo for managing in vivo studies. Colony.care is built for lab animal colony management: breeding, pedigree, cage cards, per diem billing, CCAC and IACUC reports and day-to-day vivarium operations. Benchling In Vivo runs the study. Colony.care runs the colony the study animals come from.
What Benchling Is
Benchling connects experiment records, registered entities such as biomolecules, cell lines and animals, and automated workflows on one cloud platform. Benchling In Vivo is its software for managing in vivo studies, built on the same platform.
- Study design from reusable templates, with multi-step approval
- Results captured for each animal and linked to treatment, group and sample data
- Multi-parameter randomization
- Task management and study scheduling
- Welfare monitoring with configurable alert thresholds, such as body weight loss
- Audit trails and electronic signatures
Benchling details are taken from benchling.com (October 2026).
What You Get with Colony.care
Colony.care was built for one job: managing live animal colonies. It covers the work vivarium staff do every day, for 25 species, from mouse litters to NHP single-offspring gestation to zebrafish clutches.
- QR code cage cards printed from the browser and scanned with a phone camera
- Breeding calendar, litter and weaning tracking
- Interactive pedigree with genotype overlay and consanguinity checks
- Automated per diem billing with chargeback reports
- Animal-to-protocol linking and CCAC and IACUC annual reports
- Procurement orders, pharmacy inventory, surgery records and environmental monitoring
- SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning and a REST API in the Lab plan
Can They Work Together?
Yes. The two cover different work, so a team can keep experiments and study data in Benchling and run the vivarium in Colony.care. Colony.care's REST API gives your team programmatic access to animal data, which you can use to connect colony records to your other systems. Colony.care does not ship a pre-built Benchling connector.
Colony.care Pricing
The Starter plan is free: 1 project and up to 100 animals. The Lab plan is CA$549.99/month, or CA$439.99/month billed yearly, with unlimited animals and members and 10 projects included. Additional projects are CA$34.99/month each. The Lab plan starts with a 14-day trial, no credit card required.
FAQ
Should I use Benchling or Colony.care for animal records?
Start from the work. If you need to breed, house, bill for and report on animals (breeding, cage cards, pedigree, per diem, CCAC or IACUC reports), Colony.care is built for that. If you need to design a study, randomize animals into groups and capture study results next to your other R&D data, that is what Benchling In Vivo is for. The two tools do different jobs.
Can data move between Colony.care and Benchling?
Colony.care has a REST API (v1) with API keys that gives programmatic access to animal data. Your team can use it to connect colony records to other internal systems. Records also export to CSV at any time.