Introducing Heureka Bench: Your Local-First Electronic Lab Notebook
Your research data should stay on your computer. Heureka Bench is a desktop ELN with AI-powered agentic workflows, project management, and graph-linked notes — where your data never leaves your machine.
Research data is sensitive. Experimental results, unpublished findings, grant proposals, patient data — these should not live on someone else's server by default. That's why we built Heureka Bench.
Heureka Bench is a desktop application for scientists that keeps your research data on your computer while giving you the full power of AI-driven research workflows.
Why Local-First?
Most research tools today are cloud-first. Your notes, your data, your files — they all live on a remote server. You're trusting a third party with your unpublished research, your proprietary datasets, and your team's intellectual property.
We think that's backwards.
With Heureka Bench, your projects are directories on your own filesystem. Your notes are files you own. Your paper library lives on your hard drive. Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly choose to share it.
This isn't just a philosophical stance — it's practical:
- No internet required to access your work
- No vendor lock-in — your files are standard formats
- No surprise data breaches — what's on your machine stays on your machine
- Full control — back up, move, or share on your terms
What Is Heureka Bench?
Heureka Bench is a desktop Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) built for researchers. It brings the full Heureka experience — ARC conversations, cloud projects, ARC Agent jobs — to a native desktop app, and adds a complete local-first layer on top: project management, graph-linked notes, paper library, scheduled AI tasks, presentations, and encrypted backups.
Everything you can do in Heureka on the web, you can do in Bench. Plus everything that only a desktop app can offer.
Project Management
Organize your research into projects, each with its own files, notes, and AI context. Browse and manage your files with a built-in file browser that understands code and scientific data.
Graph-Linked Notes
Create notes with automatic backlinking, forward linking, and a visual graph showing how your ideas connect. Link notes to projects, papers, and each other. Set privacy levels to control what the AI can access.
Paper Library
Manage your research papers directly in Bench. Store PDFs with metadata — title, authors, year, tags, notes. Search across your library and link papers to relevant projects and notes.
Presentations
Build slide decks in Markdown without leaving the app. Choose from light, dark, and academic themes. Present in fullscreen to your lab. No PowerPoint needed.
Encrypted Backups
When you do want to back up your work, Bench encrypts your projects with AES-256-GCM before uploading. Your data is encrypted before it ever leaves your machine.
AI That Comes to You
Here's where it gets interesting. Heureka Bench brings the full power of ARC — our AI Research Companion — directly to your desktop.
ARC Agent on Your Desktop
Chat with ARC about your research, your data, your files. ARC can read your project files, search your notes, look up genes, search the literature, and write analysis code — all within the context of your specific project.
ARC understands what your project is about and remembers what was already done.
Scheduled Autonomous Tasks
Set up recurring analysis tasks that run on a schedule — daily, weekly, or monthly. ARC will execute the task and notify you when it's done.
Imagine waking up to find that your AI research assistant has already checked for new relevant papers, run your weekly data quality check, and summarized changes in your datasets — all without you lifting a finger.
Skills and Agents
Create reusable AI workflows called Skills. A Skill is a "protocol-like" template that ARC can execute and reuse. Share Skills across projects or keep them project-specific.
Cloud Jobs When You Need Them
Some analyses are too heavy for a laptop. When you need serious compute, Bench can submit jobs to our cloud infrastructure. The results come back to your local project. You choose when to use the cloud.
The Complete Heureka Experience
Heureka Bench includes everything from our web platform — ARC conversations, cloud projects, ARC Agent jobs for bioinformatics analyses and literature reviews — and wraps it in a native desktop experience with the local-first features that researchers need most.
Your projects, your notes, your papers, your scheduled tasks — all on your machine. ARC and cloud compute when you want them. Bench is the most complete way to use Heureka: the full AI platform with the privacy and control of a desktop app.
Same account, same credits, same ARC intelligence — with the power of your local filesystem behind it.
Download Heureka Bench
Heureka Bench is available now for Mac:
Windows version is coming soon.
Coming Soon
We're continuing to develop Heureka Bench with a focus on:
- Deeper agent autonomy — more tools, more context, smarter scheduling
- Windows support — bringing the full Bench experience to Windows
We built Heureka Bench because we believe the best research tool is one that gives you everything — AI, collaboration, analysis — without asking you to give up control of your data. Your research is yours. Heureka Bench keeps it that way.
Ready to accelerate your research?
Join researchers around the world who are making discoveries faster with Heureka.