Open Source ChemDraw Alternatives
The best open source alternative to ChemDraw is BKchem. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 10 alternatives to ChemDraw and six of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to ChemDraw are XDrawChem, Gnome Chemistry Utils, JChemPaint and MollyCule.
BKChem is a free (as in free software :o) chemical drawing program. It was conceived and written by Beda Kosata and is currently maintained by Reinis Danne.
Discontinued
The last release was in 2010.
BKchem vs ChemDraw opinions
Very usefull software. You can paste images created with BKChem in a text processor or another open source graphical software like InkScape.
JohnFastmanBKchem is an old attempt at replacing some of ChemDraw's functionality. It succeeded partially in providing some of ChemDraw's very core chemical structure drawing features. Unfortunately, BKchem has seen no new development since 2010, leaving it in limbo.
XDrawChem is a free software program for drawing chemical structural formulas, available for Unix and Mac OS. It is distributed under the GNU GPL. In Microsoft Windows this program is called WinDrawChem.
Discontinued
Last release (1.10.2-1) was in January 2017.
No screenshots yetXDrawChem vs ChemDraw opinions
More simply for use in class
The Gnome Chemistry Utils include six chemistry related programs:.
JChemPaint is an editor and viewer for chemical structures in 2D. It is free and open source software, written in Java and so it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix systems.
MollyCule is a completely free Open Source Chemistry visualisation program for MacOS, Linux and Windows. MollyCule is designed to be a nice, easy to use program to help ordinary people who want to explore Chemistry.
Discontinued
Last update appears to be August 2011.
MolView is an intuitive, Open-Source web-application to make science and education more awesome!
No screenshots yet