Colony.care vs tick@lab, Full Comparison for 2026

What tick@lab Is

tick@lab covers the processes an animal research facility runs on: compliance, operations and animal welfare. It runs in any standard browser with no client installation, including on tablets, and a-tune offers it as a fully managed cloud service.

• Facility and vivarium management: room capacity, cages, census and billing
• Protocols and reporting under USDA APHIS, EU Directive 2010/63, the UK Home Office and German TSchG rules
• Veterinary and experimental records, with templates the facility designs
• Colony management and transgenic breeding: mating selection, genotyping and genealogy
• Animal requests and orders with a configurable approval process
• Billing and invoicing based on per diems and services
• Barcode and RFID identification of animals and cages, and interfaces to smart rack and caging systems
• An interface in English, French or German, with other language packages possible
• Authentication through CAS, Shibboleth, Active Directory or LDAP, and an audit trail built for 21 CFR Part 11

tick@lab details are taken from a-tune.com (October 2026).

What You Get with Colony.care

Colony.care runs in the browser and installs on a phone or tablet as a web app. You create an account, name a project and start adding animals; setup takes about two minutes and needs no sales call.

• 25 species, each with its own reproduction model: litters, single-offspring gestation, clutches and insect colonies
• QR code cage cards printed from the browser and scanned with a phone camera
• Hardware barcode and RFID readers supported
• Breeding calendar, interactive pedigree with genotype overlay, and consanguinity checks
• Clinical cases, surgery records, necropsy, pharmacy inventory and procurement orders
• Automated per diem billing with multiple rates and chargeback reports
• CCAC and IACUC annual reports, animal-to-protocol linking, electronic signatures and an audit trail kept indefinitely
• SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning and a REST API, all in the Lab plan
• A fully bilingual interface, in English and French

Colony.care does not integrate with smart racks or ventilated cage monitoring systems.

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.

When to Choose

tick@lab may fit if: you want protocol management and regulatory reporting for several national frameworks in the same system as your vivarium, you need a German interface, or you plan to connect your software to smart rack and caging systems.

Colony.care may fit if: you want to start today on a free plan with your own animals, your staff work from their phones at the cage, you manage several species, and you want published pricing with SSO and SCIM included.

FAQ

Does Colony.care integrate with smart racks?

No. Colony.care records environmental readings (temperature, humidity, light cycles) with threshold alerts, but it does not read data from smart racks or ventilated cage systems. If that connection is a hard requirement, choose software that offers it.

Can Colony.care handle pharma-scale volumes?

Yes. The Lab plan has no limit on animals or members and includes 10 projects, with additional projects available. The Organization plan covers several teams and sites under one administration. Contact sales for a configuration that matches yours.

How long does Colony.care take to set up?

About two minutes: create an account, name your project, add animals. To bring existing records, export them to CSV and use the import wizard, which lets you map columns, preview the result in a dry run, commit, and roll back.