With its origins as a chemical drawing tool, ChemDraw has evolved steadily to become the leading chemically-intelligent solution for multiple disciplines from specialty chemistry to pharmaceutical drug discovery. Some chemists love to draw and some don’t. But all of you have to share, report on, and publish your work in various formats, up to and including filing with the United States Patent and Trademarks Office. No matter which kind of chemist you are, or what your drawing and publishing requirements might be, ChemDraw has the powerful features and integrations with critical external chemistry databases to help you publish beautiful drawings in seconds not minutes or hours. It is the gold standard for chemical drawing software. Plus, it is available in four different versions to meet your specific needs.

There now 4 different versions: ChemDraw Prime is the complete entry-level structure drawing program, with all the tools you need to quickly create chemically intelligent, publication-ready chemical structures and reactions, laboratory notes and experiment write-ups. Beyond a full set of chemical structure essentials (e.g. rings, bonds, chains, atoms and functional groups), ChemDraw Prime includes property calculators, chemical and lab equipment templates and handy TLC and Gel Electrophoresis Plate drawing tools.

ChemDraw Professional takes chemical drawing to the next level, with all the features in ChemDraw Prime plus: access to ChemDraw Cloud, biopolymer tools, BioDraw, NMR prediction, advanced Name to Structure, enhanced retrosynthesis tool, and even integration with chemical databases like including SciFinder®. ChemDraw Professional also enables structure data exploration supports organization and processing with ChemDraw for Excel, ChemFinder Standard, ChemScript and ChemDraw 3D.

ChemOffice Professional is the most robust, scientifically intelligent research productivity suite in the world. It builds on the foundations of ChemDraw Prime and Professional, and adds access to powerful tools like ChemDraw Cloud, ChemDraw E-Notebook, Chem3D and ChemFinder Ultra and 3rd party interacts – helping chemists and biologists alike efficiently keep track of their work, visualize and gain a deeper understanding of their results.

ChemDraw Direct modularized ChemDraw functionality for the web! Built on the latest in JavaScript and HTML5, ChemDraw Direct can be plugged into web browsers and internal applications that need to be chemicalized. Inside its lightweight packages, ChemDraw direct carries the core functionality of the ChemDraw family including: your favorite drawing capabilities, advanced Name to Structure, Structure to Name, Hotkeys/Shortcuts, Structure Templates and Structure Query Tools

As far as I can tell most of the extra tools in ChemOffice are mainly PC only, as are ChemFinder, ChemDraw for Excel, ChemDraw 3D and the interface to MOPAC, GAMMES etc. Sadly the ability to script ChemDraw using Python is apparently Windows only which is a real shame. There is a comprehensive comparison available online ChemDraw Direct is an interesting addition, it is presumably intended to replace the ChemDraw plugins and the mobile apps that were recently withdrawn. I hope to have a look at that later.

Opening ChemDraw reveals a now familiar layout, it perhaps looks a little dated now but it has been honed over the years to afford a very efficient chemical drawing environment. However you will be delighted to know that it now supports high resolution displays. The first thing I noticed was that clicking on the “Help” brought up a blank Safari window, a check on the page source revealed a series of errors.

Over the years this has been one of the features that has proved to be frequently broken during updates, i.e. the ability to copy and paste from a chemical drawing package into Word for example and then be able to copy and paste the structure back from Word into the chemical drawing application and then be able to edit the chemical structure. To give a little historical context.

This is a very welcome update to a popular piece of chemistry software, in my hands it seems that many of the bugs that dogged previous versions have now been resolved and that the new additions will be much appreciated. The addition of HELM notation support is welcome and the expanded Hotkeys should improve efficiency in structure editing.