Should You Build Or Buy A LIMS For Your Laboratory?

Every laboratory eventually outgrows spreadsheets. The question isn't whether you'll need a LIMS, but how you'll get one.

For some labs, the appeal of building custom software is obvious. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No compromising on workflows because the platform doesn't quite match your processes. Just a system built exactly to your specifications, owned entirely by your organization.

It sounds straightforward. In practice, it rarely is.

This doesn't mean building is always wrong. For some specialized labs with truly unique workflows and dedicated development resources, custom software makes sense. But for most laboratories trying to scale operations, reduce errors, and spend time on science rather than software maintenance, the build-versus-buy decision is clear.

Let's break down both options honestly, starting with why you might choose to build.

Why Would Labs Want to Build A LIMS?

We get it, purchasing software is a daunting process. Especially a platform like a LIMS, which you ideally only switch once or twice, if ever. 

Deciding you want to buy a LIMS means researching vendors, evaluating features and capabilities, and hopping on a sales call or two. On top of that, you will inevitably need to make a trade-off or two when selecting a vendor if they do not have the features you need or support workflows exactly as you need them to.

Building a custom LIMS bypasses much of this, with the added advantages of:

• Fully customized to your needs. You don’t need to worry about choosing the “right” platform if you can build one.
• Integrates with your existing systems.
• Control over feature development.
• You, and not another company, own the software.
• No additional pro services charges when you need to make a change to a workflow

Of course, there are still disadvantages. With control comes responsibility and other drawbacks:

• Building and hosting software means high upfront setup costs for servers and licenses, storage capacity, and upgraded broadband.
• If you choose to run your software on-premise, you will need dedicated space (physical or in the cloud) and hire IT staff to maintain it. Ongoing costs to maintain these systems can increase. You’ll need to create backups, manage data recovery, apply patches, and maintain cooling.
• To enable remote access (as is common with a distributed workforce), you must have appropriate hardware and software (firewalls and VPNs), or risk exposing your corporate network to intruders.
• Your lab should use a single operating system across the entire system to ensure compatibility and simplify maintenance.

Not to mention the costs of maintaining, developing, and ensuring the platform's security. 

For a rough estimate, you could expect to spend upwards of $100,000 over six months or more to build a basic LIMS (which, by the way, will lack the level of sophistication of most cloud-based LIMS). If you do not have in-house resources, expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to enhance and maintain your LIMS. 

That’s just for an external vendor to build the software. A dedicated in-house team could be much more, as you’ll need a senior developer, project/product manager, and design resources as well. 

The costs are much more than a simple dollar amount. One lab we spoke with built its LIMS 30+ years ago and had an engineer still with the company who maintained the platform. It worked fine until that engineer retired and put a stop to all updates. This lab had to backtrack and manually document inventory and samples in notebooks as a workaround!

Rather than seek a LIMS that perfectly fits your needs now, we recommend seeking a LIMS that is flexible enough to adapt to your needs – and scale as they change.

Why Would Labs Want to Buy A LIMS?

A cloud-based LIMS will help your lab avoid the headaches that come with building your own LIMS. Going with a SaaS option eliminated headaches like hosting the software yourself, managing security, and maintaining the platform.

A cloud-based LIMS offers many advantages over a homegrown LIMS. For example: 

• Everyone in your lab can access the LIMS, regardless of location.
• The right LIMS can support your lab’s processes even as they change over time.
• You can spend more time growing your lab and less time managing and maintaining a homegrown solution.
• You can avoid the incredibly costly and high failure rates of in-house technology projects – the Standish Group’s Annual CHAOS 2020 report estimates that 66% of technology projects (based on 50K projects globally) end in partial or total failure, and Boston Consulting Group estimates that 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives.

Not to mention that you’ll benefit from continued improvements by your vendor. At QBench, we release product updates each month as we continue to invest in our platform, carrying that benefit forward to our customers.

While selecting the right software platform can involve some effort, it’s likely to be much less effort than building and maintaining your own LIMS. For labs looking to get more done without being held back by a homegrown solution, we strongly recommend investing in a cloud-based SaaS LIMS.

Buy vs Build: A Side-by-Side Comparison

We’ve covered a great deal so far. Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison to review the merits and detractors of a custom-built vs purchased LIMS:

Key Features to Look for in a LIMS

When evaluating vendors, you’ll see plenty of feature comparisons that blur together and look quite similar. Some LIMS offer AI-powered workflows, while others are more bare-bones (to put it lightly).

To make things simple, let’s break key features to look for into two categories:

• Tablestakes
• Optional, but big value-adds

Tablestakes LIMS features

We’d consider these features absolutely necessary in a good LIMS. Otherwise, what’s the point of investing in a software platform if you need to supplement it with manual workflows?

When evaluating vendors, pay close attention to the following:

• Automation: A LIMS automates routine tasks such as generating worksheets and reports, batch-running tests, monitoring inventory, tracking samples, and collecting instrument data. Look for a configurable LIMS that your staff can set up in-app, rather than a customizable one that requires expensive developer resources.
• Instrument Integration and API access: Integrating lab instruments with your LIMS centralizes all data in a single platform and eliminates manual transcription of instrument readings into spreadsheets. This ensures real-time data transfer and minimizes manual entry errors that slow down your workflow. Look for a LIMS offering a flexible REST API, but be warned that some legacy vendors require months-long waits for simple schema changes.
• Reporting: Flexible reporting tools turn your raw data into insights for viewing tests at a glance, forecasting demand, or generating audit trails for compliance. Without proper reporting capabilities, your lab risks flying blind on critical operational metrics.
• Compliance Support: While a LIMS alone isn't a complete compliance solution, many include QMS features to track quality records, instrument calibration, SOPs, training materials, and lab documentation. Strong compliance tools reduce the risk of non-compliance penalties and enhance your lab's reputation for reliability.
• Sample Management: A good LIMS tracks samples from receipt to disposal with automated barcode scanning, quality-control integrations, and easy categorization and filtering. The days of flipping through notebooks or spreadsheets to piece together a chain of custody are gone.
• Inventory Management: Beyond basic stock tracking, a LIMS helps you monitor consumables, assays, and equipment, and alerts teams to low stock levels and expiring inventory. Automated reordering prevents slowdowns and can save several hours on your weekly workflow.

It’s probably clear from this list that this is quite a featureset to support. Even before we get to the “optional” features, this would be a monumental feat to build yourself. 

Optional But Recommended Features

We’d consider these features to be optional, as their usefulness will depend on your industry and the scale at which your lab operates:

• Self-Service Customer Portal: A customer portal provides clients with direct access to real-time status updates, test results, and service requests, reducing costly back-and-forth communication.
• Batch Testing: Processing multiple samples simultaneously saves time, but becomes invaluable when issues arise—like discovering 150 overnight samples need re-running due to a calibration problem. Look for a LIMS that lets you run tests across samples simultaneously and automatically flag and re-run samples that fail QC checks.
• Billing Support: Contract testing labs need a LIMS with integrated billing to auto-generate invoices, create quotations with volume discounts and rush pricing, and integrate with accounting software. When billing ties directly to sample and test data, you eliminate under-billing revenue loss and over-billing client disputes.

Check out our guide to the key features to look for in a LIMS for a deeper dive into the above.

What To Look For In A LIMS Vendor

Once you have settled on a cloud-based solution, it’s time to ensure you choose the right LIMS for your laboratory. 

The right LIMS will be subjective. What works for one lab will not necessarily work for another. Still, we recommend considering the following, as the answers to the questions below will shape your search for a LIMS:

• Do you want a configurable or customizable LIMS?
  
  • Customizable LIMS require custom-coded changes to adapt the platform to your needs and workflows. On the other hand, a configurable LIMS puts the power of making changes in your hands.
• How much time do you have for implementation?
  
  • No LIMS comes “out-of-the-box,” so expect to spend some meaningful time on implementation. That said, it pays to have a sense of which vendors can help you see value the fastest.
• What regulatory standards do you need to meet?
  
  • Do you need a HIPAA-compliant platform to support storing clinical data? Are you trying to meet GxP standards? Ask your vendor what regulatory standards they can support.
• How do you value support from your vendor?
  
  • Some vendors provide offshore support, while others, like QBench, have a US-based support team staffed by people who’ve worked in a lab setting.

Beyond those questions, we’d recommend prioritizing the following:

• User-friendly and simple enough for non-technical members of your staff to use.
  
  • The point of a LIMS is to streamline your workflows, not overcomplicate them. We recommend looking for a user-friendly LIMS that provides quality support if you ever need assistance.
• A phased approach to implementation.
  
  • Like any software platform, a LIMS will need to be implemented for your lab. This can take some time, but some vendors (like QBench) take an iterative and phased approach to implementation, speeding up your time to value.
• Security is a priority and a first-class feature of the platform.
  
  • One compromised sample or exposed client dataset can trigger regulatory investigations and contract terminations. Look for a LIMS that's ISO 17025- and HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2-certified, and that offers audit trails, electronic signatures, and best-in-class data security standards.

Above all, we recommend looking for a LIMS that allows your lab to get more done. When choosing software, select one that empowers and speeds up your lab rather than slows it down. Be sure to check out our free guide to choosing the best LIMS for your lab.

Based on feedback from hundreds of lab implementations, we've found labs need three things above all: the ability to configure workflows without waiting on developers, support from people who've actually worked in labs, and an implementation approach that delivers value in weeks, not quarters. It’s one of the reasons we’re so proud that this commitment continues to be recognized by G2, where QBench was ranked highly for empowering labs to get more done and see better results from our LIMS.

Why Modern Labs Trust QBench LIMS

If you’re looking for a LIMS to automate and optimize your lab’s processes, we’d recommend QBench. Here’s a snapshot of why modern labs trust QBench with their data and processes:

• Configurable, not complex
• Industry-agnostic and flexible
• Phased implementation for faster value
• Built-in QMS

Configurable, Not Complex

LIMS are sophisticated platforms, but that doesn’t mean they have to be complex.

To be sure, most legacy LIMS certainly are complex. A legacy LIMS requires custom code and pro services to fit the LIMS to your exact specifications, which will introduce complexity and drive up costs in the long run. But a configurable LIMS like QBench lets you set up and modify processes as needed.

With QBench, you can do the following and more in-app:

• Generate COAs and worksheets
• Configure dashboards to monitor tests
• Build a customer-facing portal
• Manage billing and invoicing

All without custom code. With legacy LIMS, you often run into hidden costs from the complexity tax, but with QBench LIMS, modern labs can get more done and prioritize more important work 

Industry-agnostic & Flexible

QBench LIMS isn’t specifically built for the manufacturing industry, but that’s not necessarily a limitation.

QBench is industry-agnostic, but many labs see this as a strength. Rather than hyper-focusing on a single set of lab workflows, QBench is built to be configurable for a variety of needs, giving your lab full flexibility to set things up the way you want. 

We’d liken QBench to a LEGO set; you are free to match it to your needs and specifications – and you can do so much faster and more easily than a legacy LIMS that requires custom code.

A Phased Approach to Implementation

Implementation may take a while, but that doesn’t mean you need to wait months to see value.

After working with hundreds of labs, we've found that there's a temptation to get everything configured perfectly before going live (you may have heard this referred to as a “Big Bang” approach). 

We understand that mindset when working in regulated industries. However, we've seen that mindset work against getting value quickly over and over again. Completing a subset of test methods and getting them into live production quickly creates a virtuous cycle for the remaining test methods. Getting a subset of methods live quickly also builds confidence and positive momentum, fueling excitement among the team.

We refer to this as “Phased Implementation” and strongly encourage all customers to adopt it. A phased approach prevents project teams from biting off more than they can chew and from experiencing “implementation fatigue”. A phased approach also helps with change management, which typically begins after implementation. By starting change management earlier in the process, you can increase staff adoption, making for a smoother transition post-implementation.

Built-In QMS

Whether you purchase a LIMS or not, you’ll need some form of compliance management in your lab to meet regulatory standards and best practices.  Fortunately, QBench includes a built-in QMS, enabling you to manage compliance and documentation at scale. 

With an integrated QMS, you can store SOPs and compliance documentation, enabling you to accomplish much more than with a LIMS alone. QBench is proud to be SOC 2 compliant and to support labs in meeting 21 CFR Part 11 and ISO 17025 standards. 

Make The Right Choice For Your Lab With The LIMS Buyer’s Guide

If you’re set on buying a cloud-based LIMS for your lab, then the next step is to evaluate vendors and select which one(s) you want to demo. 

There’s one small problem: which vendor(s) will you review?

With so many vendors to pick from and features to consider, we created a LIMS buyer’s guide to help you make the right choice for your lab. In this guide, you will learn the following:

• The different types of LIMS available
• Key features to look out for
• A vendor comparison

And more!

Fill out the form below to get your free guide and take the first step toward automating your lab today.