StarDrop vs LiveDesign: Finding the right collaboration platform for your medicinal chemistry team

Author

Rae Lawrence

With the launch of real-time collaboration in StarDrop 8, medicinal chemistry teams now have a compelling alternative to Schrödinger’s LiveDesign. Whilst LiveDesign excels at project management and governance, and integrates well within the Schrödinger ecosystem, StarDrop 8 prioritises intuitive design, flexibility, and transparent pricing.

Read on to discover which solution best fits your team’s workflows and requirements.

The launch of StarDrop 8 adds powerful real-time collaboration to our medicinal chemistry toolkit for molecule design, optimisation and data analysis. This enables drug discovery teams to work together from any location, make faster decisions, and maintain a single source of truth as project data evolves.

It offers similar capabilities to LiveDesign, which you will likely have heard of. But which solution is the right one for you?

As we’ve said a thousand times: no glove fits every hand perfectly. The same goes for software in drug discovery. The right platform depends on your team’s needs, workflows, and technology comfort level.

Here we’ll run through some of the key differences between both platforms

LiveDesign: Built for alignment, designed for project management

LiveDesign, Schrödinger’s collaborative platform, is popular in pharma and biotech for centralising project data and enabling cross-functional access. Its browser-based interface lets teams share assay data, compound designs, and computational outputs, all within a centralised, audit-controlled environment.

It’s particularly useful for organisations already using Schrödinger’s suite of tools, as it can be integrated with Maestro’s modules. This makes it an effective way to deploy Schrödinger software-derived models downstream to chemists.

LiveDesign offers several capabilities that may appeal to teams with specific governance and project management needs:

Comprehensive audit trails provide a level of traceability valuable in regulated environments.
Automated DMTA tracking through assay cascades and LIMS integration.
Kanban board views for top-level project management.

However, LiveDesign’s powerful functionality can come with a steep learning curve, requiring additional training and ongoing support. For users who choose not to adopt the full Schrödinger ecosystem, integration with third-party tools can incur additional time and cost.

StarDrop: Real-time design and collaboration, built for chemists

With StarDrop 8, we’re bringing true real-time collaboration to the table, without sacrificing the platform’s reputation for usability. StarDrop has always been focused on what chemists actually need: an intuitive, fast, and powerful interface for compound design, optimisation, and triage. Now, it adds seamless teamwork and access auditing into the mix.

How has StarDrop been developed with medicinal chemists in mind?

A highly intuitive, visual interface that requires minimal training. It provides a straightforward environment for end-to-end medicinal chemistry design.
A choice between cloud and desktop deployment with identical functionality, ensuring a consistent experience wherever your team works. Data sets can be downloaded, worked on offline, then re-uploaded and merged, offering another level of flexibility.
Real-time workspace updates as datasets evolve, so everyone stays on the same page. This avoids the version confusion or data sprawl often experienced when static reports are regenerated.
A modular, scriptable ecosystem that teams can tailor to their specific needs, whether it’s integrating various docking engines, machine learning models, or other bio/cheminformatics tools. Importantly, these integrations aren’t limited to just Optibrium’s ecosystem.
Performance at scale. StarDrop performs without lag or sluggishness whether accessed via desktop and cloud, even with datasets containing tens of thousands of compounds.
No hidden costs. StarDrop offers clear, predictable licensing fully inclusive of upgrades, training, and support. Chemists can hit the ground running, without waiting on IT support or racking up fees for training or integration.

If you’re looking for a collaborative design platform that empowers chemists without locking you into a single vendor’s ecosystem, StarDrop 8 is a game-changer. Collaboration is embedded within a platform already optimised for medicinal chemistry, without training burden, integration headaches, or unpredictable costs.

Best of both worlds?

If your organisation already uses LiveDesign, there’s good news: Optibrium offers a script that allows StarDrop to integrate with LiveDesign, enabling a best-of-both-worlds setup. Chemists can ideate and refine designs in StarDrop, then push data into LiveDesign for governance and cross-functional tracking.

Think StarDrop could be right for you?

We would love to show you how StarDrop can help your drug discovery projects. Complete the form and a member of the team will get in touch to arrange a personalised demo for you.

Complete the form to request a personlised demo

Rae Lawrence, PhD

Product Manager

Rae holds a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

After 2 years at the helm of Optibrium’s super-star software development team, she made a lateral move within the organisation to focus more on planning and scoping the products and technologies of the future.

As Product Manager, she leverages over two decades of experience in software development, applications science, and business development—including valuable time spent as a customer. Rae serves as the crucial “universal translator,” adeptly converting customer requirements into technical specifications that enable our developers to deliver effective solutions to complex problems