Best Free Colony Counter Apps (2026)

Lab Laps is the best free colony counter app for automatic counting in 2026 — not because it only counts colonies, but because it solves the problem most labs actually have: counting is never isolated. You incubate on a timer, follow a dilution series, maybe split a culture, and then count a plate. Lab Laps keeps all of that in one free app. The colony counter uses AI detection and precise manual marking, and results sit next to the protocol that produced them. Beyond counting, you get cell culture tracking, dilution and unit calculators, plate labelling, and shareable protocol projects with multiple labelled timers per step. For bench scientists who want automatic colony detection without juggling five separate apps, Lab Laps is the clear #1.

Colonia is a focused AI colony counting app: open the camera, photograph your plate, and get a count in seconds. All processing happens on your device, which is a strong privacy story for labs that cannot upload images to the cloud. The AI handles a range of colony sizes and plate densities well for a single-purpose tool. It ranks #2 because it does one job very well, but lacks the integrated lab workflow — protocols, timers, dilutions, culture logs — that makes Lab Laps the better all-round choice for daily bench work.

Colony Counter: Bacteria by Chathura Chamikara is a straightforward free Android app that uses machine learning to count colonies from a petri dish photo. A manual mode with a long-press magnifier helps when automatic detection struggles. The developer is transparent that the app is still maturing, so treat automatic counts as a starting point and verify against your standards. For Android-only labs that want a no-cost single-purpose counter, it is a practical option — just not as polished or workflow-complete as Lab Laps or Colonia.

You do not always need a native app. Colony Counter (colony-counter.net) runs as a progressive web experience in your mobile browser: upload or capture a plate photo, count colonies automatically, adjust the result, and calculate CFU/mL — all free. For many labs, adding the site to your phone's home screen is faster than installing yet another single-purpose app. We rank it #4 on this apps list because native apps like Lab Laps and Colonia offer tighter camera integration and offline bench workflows, but for a zero-install mobile counter with CFU math built in, this site is hard to beat.

OpenCFU is not a mobile app, but no honest list of free colony counters is complete without it. This GPL-licensed desktop program has been counting bacterial colonies since 2012 and remains a research staple for labs that process large image batches on a workstation. It is faster and more filter-rich than older tools like NIST's NICE, according to comparative studies. Include it when your workflow is scanner-to-PC rather than camera-to-phone — otherwise, start with Lab Laps or Colonia for bench-side automatic counting.