Compared with other tools

Honest comparisons against the tools you are probably already using.

The rule these pages are written to: every claim about another product comes from that vendor's own pages, with the URL and the date it was retrieved. Not from a comparison blog, not from a review site, not from memory. Several roundups were read while researching these pages and they disagreed with each other on both pricing and features — which is exactly why they are disqualified.

The facts live once, in the open claim register, where each carries its first-party source and the date it was retrieved, and these pages derive from them. If a row is out of date, that is a bug in the page — vendors change their products, and an undated comparison cannot be checked.

We also state what they do better. A comparison that only flatters us is marketing, and one caught omission would rightly make you discount the whole page.

PagesCopy Anchor Link

• SnapGene — the plasmid editor most labs use. Where the free line falls, and the four things it does that we do not.
• Geneious Prime — a far broader desktop suite that wraps the field's own programs for NGS, de novo assembly and phylogenetics. Where it is plainly ahead, and what choosing a checked reimplementation over a wrapped program buys you.
• Benchling — a shared R&D platform rather than a sequence editor, free for academics on notebook and molecular biology. The informative comparison is about where the data lives, not feature counts.

One thing that is true of all threeCopy Anchor Link

They are installed desktop software (SnapGene, Geneious) or cloud-hosted (Benchling). This runs in your browser with no install, and nothing you open is uploaded anywhere — there is no server in production to upload it to.

That is a difference in architecture, not a feature comparison, and it is the one that decides whether a tool is usable on a locked-down machine or with data that may not leave the building.

The thing to try before you decide anythingCopy Anchor Link

Whatever you are comparing, the part of your work that is hardest to move is not the sequence. Every tool on this page reads and writes sequences. It is the record of how a construct was made — which reactions, from which inputs, with which parameters — and that record normally stops at the edge of the program that wrote it.

Here it comes back out. A SnapGene .dna file's cloning history is read by walking the reaction graph the file embeds; a QUEEN-authored GenBank carries its whole build script in its own annotations and is decoded back into operations; an OpenCloning strategy document is read into the reactions it describes. Any of those can then be written out as a GenBank whose annotations state how the construct was made, an OpenCloning document that loads in pydna, a runnable Python script that rebuilds the construct, or a numbered methods section.

That is worth ten minutes even if you read nothing else here and go on using what you already have, because it is reading your own files and writing them back into formats nobody owns. See Construction history.