# openbabel/openbabel

Open Babel is a chemical toolbox designed to speak the many languages of chemical data.

Repository: https://github.com/openbabel/openbabel
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/openbabel
Homepage: http://openbabel.org/
Language: C++
License: GPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: chemistry, chemical-data, cheminformatics, c-plus-plus, chemical-toolbox
Last push: 2026-08-18T20:30:41+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 92/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 98, release rhythm 80, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 6459, "days_push": 15, "days_rel": 53, "gap_med": 46, "n_releases_24m": 2}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1376, forks 484 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:33.327869+00:00)

## What it is
Open Babel is an open-source chemical toolbox that reads, writes, converts, searches, and analyzes chemical data across more than 100 molecular file formats. It provides both ready-to-use command-line programs and a GUI, plus a complete C++ programmer's toolkit with bindings for building cheminformatics applications.

## Use cases
- convert chemical file formats like SDF, MOL2, PDB, and SMILES
- generate 2D and 3D coordinates from SMILES or InChI strings
- search and filter molecular files using SMARTS substructure patterns
- perform molecular fingerprint similarity searching on large datasets
- calculate molecular properties like TPSA, molecular weight, and forcefield energies
- remove duplicate molecules and sort structures in a multimolecule file
- depict compounds as images with highlighted substructures
- integrate cheminformatics into a C++ or Python application

## When to choose
- you need to interconvert between many chemical file formats
- you want a mature, widely cited cheminformatics toolkit with C++ and Python APIs
- you need substructure or similarity searching over molecular datasets
- you work across molecular modeling, materials science, or biochemistry data

## When to avoid
- you need a pure-Python cheminformatics stack with pip-installable wheels (consider RDKit)
- you only need simple 2D structure drawing in a web app
- you require a permissive license, since Open Babel is GPL-2.0

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: parser, serialization, search-engine, cli, sdk
- domain: chemistry, bioinformatics, developer-tools, files
- platform: windows, cpp, python, cross-platform, cli
- tags: cheminformatics, chemical-file-formats, smiles, inchi, smarts, molecular-modeling, file-conversion, c-plus-plus, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- openbabel/openbabel (main) score 92

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:33.327869+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:40:31.239054+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/openbabel/openbabel (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:33.327869+00:00, sha 9c68860fb74d)
  - homepage: http://openbabel.org/ (fetched 2026-08-29T11:56:43.000694+00:00, sha 26364311f147)
  - site_page: http://openbabel.org/docs/index.html (fetched 2026-08-29T11:56:43.003318+00:00, sha 00349eb70ba7)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.