BioRender: Publication Rights, Licensing, and Alternatives for Research Figures

BioRender is a browser-based scientific illustration platform used to build figures for journal articles, theses, posters, and presentations from a library of pre-drawn, expert-reviewed life-science icons. It has become the default tool many labs reach for when a mechanism diagram, experimental workflow, or graphical abstract needs to look publication-ready without a designer. What BioRender’s own marketing pages will not walk you through in any detail is what you are actually allowed to do with a figure once you have made it — whether a free-tier figure can go into a manuscript, what a lapsed subscription does to a figure you already published, how to credit the tool correctly in a legend, and how its licence interacts with the copyright transfer or licence agreement your journal asks you to sign. Those questions sit squarely in research-administration territory, and this guide covers them directly, alongside a fair look at what BioRender is for and where its licensed-icon model is, and is not, the right fit.

What BioRender is and who uses it

BioRender is a web application (no desktop install) built around two things: a large library of scientifically styled icons and templates covering molecules, cells, organisms, lab equipment, and disease pathways, and a drag-and-drop canvas for arranging them into a figure. It is aimed specifically at life-science and biomedical researchers who need to communicate a mechanism, pathway, or protocol visually but are not trained illustrators. Typical outputs include:

• Mechanism and pathway figures — signalling cascades, disease mechanisms, molecular interactions.
• Experimental workflow diagrams — the step-by-step schematic showing how a study or protocol was carried out, often reproduced in a methods section or supplementary figure.
• Graphical abstracts — the single-panel visual summary many journals now request alongside a submission (see CASRAI’s graphical abstract guide for what journals expect in that format specifically).
• Poster panels — individual schematic elements dropped into a larger conference poster layout (see CASRAI’s research poster design guide).
• Presentation and teaching figures — lab meeting slides, course materials, grant-application schematics.

It is not a general vector-illustration tool and it is not built for plotting data — charts, graphs, and statistical figures drawn from real datasets belong in dedicated plotting software, not an icon-library tool like this one (see the data-figure section below). BioRender’s own value proposition is speed and a consistent, professional visual style drawn from a curated icon set, not open-ended creative control.

Publication and licensing rights: what the free tier actually permits

This is the part a lab is most likely to get wrong, because the distinction is easy to miss until a figure is already in a submitted manuscript. Based on BioRender’s own published terms of service and help-centre documentation (current as of this writing — licence terms are the kind of detail that changes without much notice, so verify against the live terms linked at the end of this section before you rely on any of it):

• Free-plan figures are not licensed for publication. BioRender’s terms distinguish between using the platform to build a figure and holding the right to publish that figure. A figure exported under a free account is described in BioRender’s own terms as not carrying publication or commercial-use rights — it is intended for internal drafting, review, and non-published use. Publishing a free-tier figure in a journal article, thesis, or public preprint is, per BioRender’s stated terms, outside what the free plan authorises.
• A paid (individual, lab, or institutional academic) plan is what grants the publication licence. BioRender describes its academic/premium plans as covering academic, research, teaching, and not-for-profit uses including posters, presentations, theses, and journal or textbook publication, subject to whatever specific publishing guidelines the exported licence states.
• An exported publication licence is generally described as surviving the subscription that produced it. BioRender’s documentation states that a figure exported while on a paid plan retains its publication rights even if the subscription later lapses or is downgraded — the licence attaches to that specific exported figure at export time, not to an ongoing active subscription. Do not assume this without checking: confirm the exact wording current at the time you export, since this is precisely the kind of term a vendor can revise, and your institution’s specific agreement (see institutional licensing below) may layer additional or different terms on top of the standard plan terms.
• Crediting the tool is generally required, separate from the licence question. BioRender’s guidance calls for the acknowledgment “Created with BioRender.com” to appear in the figure legend, acknowledgments, or references section. Figures exported under a paid plan typically come with a unique citation and permalink generated at export time, which some authors include alongside or instead of the plain attribution line. Some institutional or lab subscriptions are also associated with an internal agreement reference number in BioRender’s own records, used for licence administration rather than as something that must appear in the published legend itself — but if your institution’s agreement specifically instructs you to include one, follow that instruction over general guidance.

Practical takeaway for a lab or an author: before a BioRender figure goes into a submitted manuscript, thesis, or public preprint, confirm (a) that the export was made under a paid/academic plan, not a free trial, and (b) what the current exported-figure citation format is, directly from BioRender’s own terms-of-service and publication-rights pages at the time of export, not from a lab’s institutional memory of an older policy. These specific licence terms should be verified against BioRender’s current terms of service and help-centre pages (biorender.com/terms-of-service and the BioRender Help Center’s publication-rights articles) rather than taken from this or any secondary source, since terms of this kind are revised by the vendor without much notice.

How this interacts with a journal’s copyright transfer or licence agreement

A separate and often-overlooked question: does BioRender’s publication licence conflict with the copyright transfer agreement (CTA) or exclusive licence to publish that your journal requires at acceptance? See CASRAI’s copyright transfer agreement entry for what these agreements typically ask an author to assign. In practice:

• You do not own the individual BioRender icons in your figure — you hold a licence to use them as arranged in your specific figure. What you can typically transfer or licence to a publisher is your own arrangement/composition (the figure as you built it), not the underlying icon library itself.
• Most journals accept BioRender-made figures routinely, precisely because this is now a common workflow across life-science publishing — but the author remains responsible for having the right to publish the figure at the point of submission, which loops back to the free-vs-paid distinction above.
• If your work is published under a Creative Commons licence (common for open-access articles), check that this is compatible with how you are permitted to redistribute a BioRender-built figure — the figure’s underlying icons remain BioRender’s licensed content even inside an open-access CC-licensed article, so the CC licence generally applies to your original text and data, not automatically to redistribution of the icon library itself. This is a genuinely unsettled area in practice across different journals’ policies; when in doubt, ask the journal’s editorial office and check BioRender’s current guidance rather than assuming either way.

None of this is a substitute for reading your specific export licence and your journal’s specific author agreement. Treat the general pattern above as a prompt for what to check, not as a ruling on your own case.

Institutional vs. individual licences

This is where research administration, rather than an individual researcher’s judgment call, typically owns the decision. BioRender is sold both as an individual subscription and as an institutional or lab licence, and the two behave differently in ways that matter for procurement and compliance:

• Individual licence. A single researcher subscribes directly, typically at an academic discounted rate with an institutional email. Publication rights and billing sit entirely with that individual; if they leave the lab or institution, the subscription (and, depending on the plan, ongoing access to unpublished drafts) generally leaves with them, though previously exported publication licences are described by BioRender as surviving independently, per the section above.
• Institutional or lab licence. Purchased centrally (often through a library, a department, or a core facility) and provisioned to multiple users under one agreement. This is usually the better fit where more than a handful of researchers in a department will use the tool regularly — it centralises billing, gives the institution a single agreement to review for compliance and data-handling terms, and avoids each lab member negotiating their own plan. Many universities’ library or IT services pages list current BioRender access this way, similar to how they list access to reference managers or statistical software.
• What to check before procuring at either level: which plan tier the licence actually grants (does it include publication rights, or is it a lower “view/edit only” tier?), whether the agreement’s terms differ from BioRender’s standard public terms of service, data-residency/handling terms if your institution has research-data-security requirements, and who is authorised to sign or renew the agreement. This procurement question — confirming what a vendor agreement actually grants, rather than assuming the marketing page describes every seat — is the same due-diligence pattern CASRAI covers for other research-tool licensing decisions; see the research tools hub for related software-licensing content.

Alternatives, and how their licensing differs

BioRender is not the only option, and for some use cases it is not the best-fit one. The real differentiator across alternatives is less “which looks nicer” and more what licence you actually get for the output:

• Servier Medical Art — a library of medical and life-science illustrations released by the pharmaceutical company Servier under a Creative Commons licence (historically CC-BY 3.0/4.0), meaning figures built from it can generally be reused, modified, and redistributed, including commercially, provided attribution is given per the specific CC licence version in force. This is a materially different licensing model from BioRender’s paid-export-only publication right, and worth checking directly against Servier Medical Art’s current licence terms before relying on it, since licence versions and terms can change.
• Mind the Graph — a direct BioRender competitor with its own icon library and subscription-tiered publication rights; broadly the same licensing model as BioRender (free tier restricted, paid tier grants publication rights), so the same free-vs-paid diligence applies.
• Inkscape — a free, open-source vector editor with no built-in scientific icon library. What you draw is fully yours to license as you choose, but there is a real time and skill cost to building a figure from scratch or from separately-sourced icon sets (some of which, like the open bioicons library, are themselves separately licensed and need their own attribution check).
• Adobe Illustrator — the professional standard for from-scratch vector illustration, licensed per Adobe’s own subscription terms; output ownership is straightforward (you own what you draw), but again there is no built-in scientific icon library and a steeper learning curve than a template-driven tool.
• Canva — general-purpose design software with some science-adjacent templates; licensing for its own stock elements works similarly to BioRender’s tiered model (check Canva’s current terms for what a given plan permits for publication use), but its icon library is not purpose-built for scientific accuracy the way BioRender’s or Servier’s are.
• SciDraw — a smaller, community-contributed repository of scientific icons, typically released under open licences by individual contributing artists; check the specific licence attached to each icon set, since terms can vary contributor to contributor within the same repository.
• R (ggplot2) / Python (matplotlib, seaborn) — the correct tool, not an alternative in the same category, for anything that is actually a data figure rather than a schematic: bar charts, scatter plots, box plots, and other visualisations drawn from a real dataset. Licensing is not really the relevant axis here (these are free, open-source plotting libraries); the reason to use them instead of an icon-library tool is that a data figure needs to faithfully represent numbers, not be assembled from decorative icons. See the note on figure integrity below.

The general pattern: BioRender-style tools with a curated proprietary icon library (BioRender, Mind the Graph, Canva’s premium assets) tend to gate publication rights behind a paid tier; openly-licensed libraries (Servier Medical Art, SciDraw, bioicons) tend to grant broader reuse rights up front but require careful per-source attribution and offer a smaller, less curated set to work from. Neither model is universally “better” — the right choice depends on budget, how often a lab produces figures, and how much attribution bookkeeping the lab is willing to take on.

Accessibility and figure-integrity considerations

Two considerations apply regardless of which tool builds the figure:

• Colour-blind-safe palettes. Roughly 1 in 12 men and a much smaller proportion of women have some form of colour vision deficiency, most commonly red-green. A schematic that relies on red/green contrast alone to distinguish pathway elements, conditions, or groups can be unreadable to a real share of readers and reviewers. Favour palettes that remain distinguishable in grayscale, or pair colour coding with a second visual cue — shape, pattern, label, or line style — so the figure doesn’t depend on colour perception alone. This applies to a BioRender schematic exactly as much as it applies to a data chart built in R or Python.
• Illustration must not misrepresent what actually happened. A schematic or workflow diagram is not raw data, but journals’ image-integrity expectations are not limited to photographic data images. A methods schematic that shows steps that weren’t actually performed, omits a step in a way that changes what a reader would conclude about the method, or otherwise misrepresents the real experimental process is a figure-integrity problem, not a stylistic one. See CASRAI’s image manipulation and image duplication entries, and the broader scientific figure rules for journal submission guide, for how publishers and integrity offices treat figure accuracy generally — the same underlying principle (a figure must accurately represent what was done or found) applies to an icon-built schematic as much as to a photographed gel or blot.

Frequently asked questions

Can I publish a figure I made on BioRender’s free plan?

Per BioRender’s own stated terms, figures made on the free plan are not licensed for publication or commercial use — a paid (individual or institutional academic) plan is what grants publication rights. Confirm the current terms directly with BioRender before submitting a manuscript, since this is exactly the kind of detail worth checking rather than assuming.

What happens to a published figure’s licence if my subscription lapses?

BioRender’s documentation describes a publication licence as attaching to the specific figure at the time it was exported under a paid plan, and states that this licence generally survives a later lapse or downgrade of the subscription. This is a vendor term that can be revised, so verify the current wording rather than relying on general guidance, particularly for a figure you plan to reuse (for example, in a later review article) well after the original export.

How do I credit BioRender in a figure legend?

BioRender’s guidance calls for the acknowledgment “Created with BioRender.com” in the figure legend, acknowledgments, or references, and paid-plan exports typically come with a unique citation and permalink you can include as well. Check your specific export’s citation details and your institution’s licence, since an institutional agreement may specify its own citation requirement.

Is a BioRender figure compatible with an open-access Creative Commons licence?

Not automatically. Your article’s CC licence generally covers your own original text and data; the icons inside a BioRender-built figure remain separately licensed content from BioRender, so redistributing that figure under the same open terms as the rest of your CC-licensed article is not guaranteed. Check with your journal’s editorial office and BioRender’s current terms if this matters for your specific publication.

Should our lab buy an individual or institutional BioRender licence?

If more than a handful of people in a department or lab group will use it regularly, an institutional or lab licence, procured and reviewed centrally, is usually the better fit — it centralises billing and gives someone with procurement authority a single agreement to check for what it actually grants, rather than each researcher negotiating and tracking their own individual plan.

Is BioRender the right tool for a data chart, not a schematic?

No. BioRender is an icon-and-template library for schematics, mechanism diagrams, and workflow figures, not a plotting tool. A chart drawn from a real dataset — a bar chart, scatter plot, or box plot — should be built in dedicated statistical or plotting software (R/ggplot2, Python/matplotlib or seaborn, or your statistical package’s own plotting output) so it accurately represents the underlying numbers.