I have briefly played with the cloud-based Cytobank and liked it. But the subscription fee is steep. At the same time, I don't want to part way with the tried and true Flowjo. How do people think of Cytobank? Is it going to supersede Flowjo and thus worth investing for a subscription?
Great question! I don't know if am the right person to help, since to date I haven not used either, but you are dealing here with private profit making companies. Flowjo I'm not sure. It seems more social based. Undoubtedly, in out brave new world you will have to pay for the service if it is important to you. My suggestion, keep with what you know if it is low cost.. perhaps communicate with them about deficiencies. But, if you have the funds by all means hop over to the service for fee cytobank. Hope this helps.
In my opinion it depends a lot on what you plan to do with it and what kind of "style" you prefer. Cytobank has very nice and modern looking graphs, a very intuitive and intelligent work flow and user-interface and is very good with high-throughput and especially multi-channel analyses. So, when you do Cytof or more than 15 channel FACS and you want to use tools like Spade or Visne there is probably no way around it. On the other hand, Flowjo also has some features which at least I have not found yet in Cytobank (overlay of scatterplots for example), and it allows for more fine tuning, customizing and parameters to be defined by the user (like setting gates for compensation manually etc.), whereas Cytobank sometimes appears a bit like an Apple product - very good, very intelligent, perfect for 90% of all situations. But if you need something different, there is no way to change it. It's also a question of who will use the software in the lab - if it is only you and you are already a FlowJo expert you may stick with it, but if there are people less adept with it I think Cytof is easier to learn, and since there is less flexibility analyses from other users are easier to understand and to review.
As far as I know, Cytobank provides a 30 day free trial of the software and a pretty good and quick tutorial. If you use it for a while you will quickly get a feeling for whether you like it or not.
I do almost everything with Cytobank now, but I did not delete my FlowJo copy either, just in case :)
Does somebody knows how much the Cytobank memberships cost after the 1-month free trial?
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