---
title: Lab & local tools
description: >-
  Bench-automation bridges and data-processing utilities — protocol
  generation for lab robots and server-side data transforms.
tags:
  - concepts
  - tools
  - lab
  - reference
---

Lab and local tools sit at the edges of the compute catalog: they either bridge a computational result out to physical laboratory execution, or they do lightweight processing right where you are instead of on the GPU fleet. Some turn a designed compound into a ready-to-run robot protocol and submit it to a cloud lab; others run entirely in your browser, so molecular data never leaves your environment. Reach for these when a result is ready for the bench, or when you want a quick transform or property estimate without dispatching a job. This page is the front door to that catalog.

> **Wetlab tools need the right plan**

> The lab-automation bridges reach real robotic hardware and are gated by plan. Protocol generation and cloud-lab submission require a tier with wetlab access — see [Plans and tiers](/docs/plans-and-tiers) for what each tier unlocks. Data Processing has no wetlab gate.

## The catalog

## How these run

Lab and data tools span two execution styles. Data Processing runs a server-side job over your stored datasets, and Lab Automation bridges out to physical or cloud-hosted robotic hardware. Processing on your own machine (local processing) is planned but not available yet; today, molecule-level work such as fingerprints and format conversion runs server-side through [RDKit](/docs/rdkit).

- [How tools run](/docs/how-tools-run) — the execution-class explainer: which tools dispatch a job, which return inline, and where each output lands.

## Read next