About · Inquestra
Built by researchers. Free for researchers.
Inquestra is a free, browser-based Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) for life sciences, chemistry, biotech, materials science, and engineering. It was built out of frustration with the fragmented, expensive, and domain-narrow state of scientific documentation tools — and a belief that every researcher deserves a professional, unified workspace without a licensing fee or an IT department.
The problem
Scientific research today involves at least five disconnected tools: a word processor for protocols, a spreadsheet for inventory, a citation manager for references, a molecular drawing program for structures, and a separate data logger for instrument output. When a rotating student joins a lab, onboarding means installing and learning all five — and then keeping them in sync manually.
The ELN market exists to solve this problem, but most solutions reproduce it in a different form: they lock you into a single scientific domain (molecular biology, or physical science, but rarely both), charge per-user licensing fees that academic labs cannot sustain across rotating students, or require institutional IT infrastructure just to get started.
Inquestra is built on the premise that this is unnecessary. A single, well-designed, browser-based workspace can serve a molecular biologist, a materials scientist, and an electrical engineer in the same research group — with no installation, no subscription, and no compromise on features.
What Inquestra is
Inquestra is an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) for the full breadth of experimental science. In a single browser tab, researchers can:
- →Write, execute, and version-control scientific protocols with rich text, equations, molecular structures, tables, and embedded timers
- →Manage chemical and biological inventories — reagents, standards, samples, instruments — with lot tracking and automatic protocol linkage
- →Render 2D chemical structures from canonical SMILES with live PubChem property resolution
- →Search PubMed and Europe PMC and insert formatted literature citations directly into protocols
- →Log instrument data from USB-connected hardware (Arduino, ESP32, and standard serial devices) directly into the notebook with cryptographic timestamps
- →Generate cryptographic audit trails and verifiable exports adhering to 21 CFR Part 11 technical controls
All of this is free, with no per-researcher licensing cost, no mandatory account creation, and no software to install. Researchers can start in a guest workspace immediately and sync to a free account when they are ready to persist their data.
Who Inquestra is for
Students and rotating researchers
Undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows who need a professional research notebook from day one — without waiting for institutional licenses or on-boarding tutorials.
Academic lab groups
University research groups in life sciences, chemistry, biotech, materials science, or engineering that need a shared protocol library, inventory system, and reproducible experimental record.
Independent and citizen scientists
Researchers without institutional affiliation who need a professional tool without paying enterprise pricing. Inquestra requires no institutional email or IT department.
Multidisciplinary research groups
Labs that span molecular biology, chemistry, and hardware instrumentation — where domain-specific tools like Benchling leave gaps in the workflow.
Founder & Engineering Leadership
Kaleb
Founder & Lead Builder · Inquestra
Inquestra was created by Kaleb out of first-hand frustration running bench sensor experiments and lab trials: commercial Electronic Lab Notebooks are either gated behind enterprise procurement walls costing tens of thousands of dollars, locked into proprietary cloud silos, or completely disconnected from physical bench instrumentation and hardware.
Instead of accepting that student researchers, iGEM teams, and independent labs have to stitch together Google Docs, loose CSV files, and unverified scripts, Inquestra was engineered from the ground up on modern browser standards (W3C Web Serial, PubChem REST integration, and local IndexedDB cryptographic storage). It provides an open, local-first workspace where researchers retain 100% ownership over their data and bench protocols.
Open development
Inquestra is developed openly on GitHub. The source code is inspectable, issues are tracked publicly, and contributions from the research community are welcome. Scientific software should be auditable — particularly software involved in data provenance and audit trails.
Try Inquestra in your browser — free.
No credit card. No institutional affiliation required. Launch the workspace and start your first protocol today.