Introduction

This post explains some of the new features introduced in eLabFTW 5.6. The complete list of changes is available on the release page.

A note about “stable” releases

eLabFTW is a living project — “stable” should not be taken to mean that it is no longer evolving. Version 5.6.0 is production-ready, but minor bugs will surface once it is in wide use, and patches will follow.

🌟 Summary of the Community Meeting on June 16, 2026

In this meeting, we talked about how eLabFTW supports open science and interoperability via the .eln file format. Specifically, we discussed two projects closely related to eLabFTW:

• The ELN Consortium - This is a group of ELN editors and vendors who work to support interoperability between ELNs via the .eln file format. We talked about the goals of the consortium and how to get involved. The ELN Consortium was created by Nico Carpi and Dr. Stefan Brinkman to develop a standardized file format based on the ROCrate specification using JSON-LD and Zip archives. To learn more about the ELN Consortium, visit the website https://the.elnconsortium.org/ and the GitHub page https://github.com/theelnconsortium

🌟 Communauté Francophone eLabFTW du 9 Juin 2026

Cette première rencontre de la communauté francophone eLabFTW a permis d’échanger autour de plusieurs sujets liés au déploiement, à l’adoption et aux usages d’eLabFTW. La réunion s’est ouverte par une présentation d’Élodie Papin, du Centre de Documentation de l’Université de Lorraine, consacrée à l’utilisation d’eLabFTW au sein de l’UL.

Elle a été suivie d’une session de questions réponses sur divers sujets.

Voir l’enregistrement

Lien Youtube

🌟 Summary of the RDM club meeting on June 2nd, 2026

The RDM Club meeting on 2 June 2026 featured a presentation by Alexander Bardel about the Austrian ELN community, which includes individuals from a network of universities in Austria who collaborate to provide sustainable Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) services.

The community aims to represent shared interests, develop national support structures, and promote interoperability, sustainability, and user-centred Research Data Management (RDM) infrastructure. Motivated by Austrian Open Science policies and long-term sustainability goals, the project has established cross-institutional collaborations, organised community events, and conducted an ELN feature survey. Although the funded project is ending, the community plans to continue through mailing lists, chat channels, shared training materials, internal documentation, and a future community platform for ELN operators. Participants agreed that while national coordination is valuable, support networks should remain as close to researchers as possible.

🌟 Summary of the RDM club meeting on March 31, 2026

In this meeting, we discussed ideas for improving workflow and project management capabilities in eLabFTW.

Participants reported that they currently used project management functions in OpenProject, GitLab, and Redmine, along with Gantt charts, Kanban boards, saved searches, and template recommendations. There was interest in better representing research workflows and relationships by integrating parent-child and many-to-many relationships between experiment and resource entities.

Introduction

When choosing how to deploy eLabFTW, organizations usually compare two options: SaaS and On-Premise.

At first glance, the difference seems simple. With SaaS, the service is hosted and maintained by the provider. With On-Premise, the organization installs and operates the software on its own infrastructure.

Both models are valid. On-Premise can be the right choice for organizations with strict internal policies, dedicated infrastructure teams, or specific regulatory constraints. But in practice, the real difference is not only where the software runs. The real difference is who is responsible for keeping it secure, updated, backed up, and operational over time.

🌟 Summary of the Community Meeting on April 28, 2026

This eLabFTW Community Meeting featured two presentations from the community:

• Dionyssis Antypas (Heidelberg University Biochemistry Center) - “elAPI Plugins: Facilitating Batch Uploads and Downloads from eLabFTW”
• Leonid Bovkun (Postdoc, Chair for Applied Physics, University of Würzburg) - “Bridging people, data, and infrared devices: a User’s perspective for collaborative research and development using elabFTW”

In the first presentation, Dionyssis described how the elAPI Plugins desktop application enables batch upload and download of research data to eLabFTW through Excel and CSV files. The application makes it possible to import data into existing templates in eLabFTW, thus improving options for data standardization. In the second presentation, Leonid shared how physicists use eLabFTW for project management in quantum device development, highlighting the challenges of tracking complex experimental data across different instruments and team members.

eLabFTW release schedule

eLabFTW follows a frequent release model: new minor versions are published regularly, and patch releases are issued when needed. We do not provide Long Term Support (LTS) versions.

This post explains why.

Release schedules are a tradeoff

Software projects adopt many different release strategies. Some publish major versions on a fixed schedule. Some release continuously. Others have long gaps between releases.

No single approach is objectively best. Each model comes with tradeoffs between stability, maintenance effort, development speed, and security response. The right choice depends on the nature of the software and the resources available to maintain it.

🌟 RDM Club Meeting 6

Thank you to everyone who attended the most recent RDM Club meeting, which was held on January 27, 2026.

In this meeting we first discussed the template sharing website, and attendees suggested additional improvements to add before we open the site to the public. Some great ideas and improvements were considered, and we are hard at work implementing them now! We hope that the template sharing website will be open to the public soon.

Introduction

«Wait a minute! Wasn’t 5.4 released not long ago?» you might be thinking. And you are right. eLabFTW 5.5 follows closely the release of 5.4, as we have modified our release process to allow faster iterations and longer support for older releases. But this change also makes it difficult to continue release 5.4, so we decided to quickly jump to 5.5 which uses the new build process.