How does Senaite LIMS relate to Bika?

Background

Bika 1,2 and 3, from 2002 to 2017, established the foundation Senaite rests on. Senaite 1's initial design analysis went under the Bika 4 moniker, with an emphasis on performance and maintainability

After going global and attracting a wider group of participants, Bika LIMS suffered from a nagging naming issue: in the fog of the early Internet, the project and Cape Town founding company were both set up using Bika in their titles, unfair to other contributors Naralabs followed by Riding Bytes

As a result Bika 4 manifested under new title Senaite in 2018, sixteen years after the project's initial inception

The code has been transformed, and project goals achieved with aplomb

With so much invested, the Bika brand is maintained independently from Cape Town, providing add-ons to extend the generic LIMS Senaite base with functions outside its lean performance driven scope

Today

Bika Lab Systems continued to code Senaite improvements from Cape Town, and commissioned by generous clients, a number of add-ons that fall outside Senaite's own scope

These were all publicly released as Senaite add-ons, including some very Bika-specific ones under the Bika moniker

They have grown to a substantial set of enhancements, enough to justify Bika releases - with a Senaite core at its heart. The Bika LIMS suite on Github

There are no differences in Bika and Senaite architecture and primary features, they share the same modern robust UI and API, the same modularity and usability, and the same Python 3 and Plone 5 migration path that comes with Senaite’s evolution.

Differentiation

Apart form the independent Bika add-ons, there are often requirements in distinctly differentiated lab disciplines collected in Bika branches, e.g Bika Cannabis vs Bika Fire Assay

Fine tuned over years, Bika also distributes these complete setup configurations for different LIMS branches

In the spirit of Ubuntu, Bika strives for a holistic delivery model. We value honesty as in 'Tell it as it is' translated from isiZulu 'to report'