Best LCA software in 2026: 7 life cycle assessment tools for US manufacturers

LCA software runs life cycle assessments, also called life cycle analyses, which model a product’s environmental impact from raw materials to disposal (cradle to grave), following the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards, which means ISO compliance is the first thing to check in any tool. The seven tools below are the best LCA software options for US businesses, from free open-source engines to life cycle assessment software that produces product carbon footprints (PCFs) and environmental product declarations (EPDs) for entire catalogs.

In the US, product data requests now come from state procurement rules and from customers, because the federal programs ended in 2025. Choosing software for life cycle assessment therefore starts with who is asking: EPD output matters for construction materials sold under Buy Clean California, while Scope 3 reporting under California’s SB 253 starts in 2027.

Most LCA software solutions follow the four phases of an LCA: define the goal and scope, build the inventory, assess the impact and interpret the results. ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 set the method for any LCA. ISO 14067 applies to product carbon footprints, and an EPD packages the results in a standardized declaration. Beyond that baseline, we look at five capabilities when comparing tools:

• A large, current LCA database: inventory data such as ecoinvent, USLCI and EPD libraries drives the accuracy of every result, and a broad database lets one tool cover many kinds of products.
• Guided, approachable use: a team starting an LCA may have no LCA background, so templates, clear navigation and expert guidance help to reduce input errors and shorten the first assessment.
• Reporting and visualization: exportable reports for stakeholders and charts that show where a product’s impact sits make the numbers usable outside the sustainability team. Standard outputs include a PCF, an EPD or a full ISO report.
• Scenario simulation: comparing a design, material or supplier change before committing shows how much it would change a product’s impact.
• Integrations: connections to ERP, PLM and supplier tools bring bill of materials and supplier data into the model automatically.

The best LCA software depends on your profile: openLCA fits experts on a budget, Sphera serves large teams with LCA specialists, EC3 covers US construction materials, and Greenly or Ecochain work for manufacturers that need product footprints at scale.

Prices are as published by each vendor.

Greenly’s LCA platform produces ISO 14040/44/67-compliant product carbon footprints at scale. You describe a product in plain language, and EcoPilot builds a structured, ISO-aligned LCA template in the same session, with life cycle stages, activities and automatic emission factor matching. ADEME, the French Agency for Ecological Transition, audited the method for compliance with ISO 14040, 14044 and 14067, so a third party has checked how the footprints are calculated, and every output stays traceable for clients, auditors and regulators. Reports cover ISO 14067 product carbon footprints and EPDs (EN 15804, ISO 21930), along with ISO 14040/44 and PEF/PEFCR formats.

Key features

• AI with user sign-off: EcoPilot proposes every action, and nothing is calculated until you confirm it.
• Data import: upload a bill of materials from a CSV, ERP or PLM system and the platform maps the columns automatically. EcoPilot also structures data that sits in PDFs, spreadsheets or product descriptions, and automated questionnaires collect supplier input.
• Auditable enrichment: when primary data is missing, enrichment workflows generate transparent estimates from product categories and industry benchmarks. Each enriched data point is flagged with its confidence level, and a Data Quality Ratio tracks source reliability and emission factor uncertainty for every input.
• Data: 300,000+ emission factors from regulatory, LCA-specific, manufacturing, industry and energy databases, plus custom emission factors.
• Scale: Mass LCA matches emission factors once and reuses shared parts across the portfolio. ManoMano has run more than 2 million product LCAs on the platform, and Lyreco processes more than 8,000 a month.
• Customer example: Energy Vault used Greenly’s LCAs to optimize the sustainability of its B-VAULT™ energy storage system, with benefits for supplier relationships and product design.
• Link to Scope 3: completed LCAs become custom emission factors that feed Scope 3 reporting, which California’s SB 253 requires from 2027.

Pricing

Greenly sells its LCA platform on quote, with a 30-minute demo available.

Best for: manufacturers and retailers that need product carbon footprints and EPDs across a large catalog without an in-house LCA team. Bill of materials import, templates and EcoPilot suggestions keep each new assessment short, and the link to Scope 3 reporting suits companies that also face California’s SB 253.

openLCA is open-source LCA software that GreenDelta, a company based in Berlin, has developed since 2006 and publishes under the MPL 2.0 license. It models LCAs in compliance with ISO 14040 and 14067, the GHG Protocol and the Environmental Footprint method, creates EPDs compliant with EN 15804, and also covers social LCA and life cycle costing.

Key features

• Open source: the full source code is available, so advanced users can audit the calculations or modify them. openLCA runs as a desktop application that exchanges no data with outside parties unless the user chooses to, so models and data stay private.
• Modeling depth: parameters, nested models, regionalized modeling and uncertainty simulation, with results grouped by life cycle stage and drilled down to the finest contribution.
• Data: all major LCA databases work in openLCA, large or small. USLCI, the US Life Cycle Inventory Database, is released in openLCA format on the Federal LCA Commons, which runs on openLCA Collaboration Server.
• Sharing: full models can be shared, refined with parameters and substitutions, and pushed to onlineLCA for colleagues to use.

Pricing

openLCA is completely free, with no license costs. Some databases on the Nexus repository are paid, and ecoinvent data requires an ecoinvent license.

Best for: LCA experts and researchers who want a free engine they can inspect and script. Open-source code, uncertainty simulation and USLCI data suit teams that already know how to build their own models, and onlineLCA lets them share the results with colleagues.

Sphera LCA for Experts is the product that GaBi software evolved into after becoming part of Sphera in 2019. It is built for product sustainability experts, who get modeling, reporting and diagnostic tools on top of Sphera’s Managed LCA Content database, and Sphera offers software, data and consulting together.

Key features

• Datasets: Managed LCA Content holds more than 20,000 datasets across 60+ industries that DEKRA verifies, and the software includes 1,000 models that experts can reuse or replace with their own. Saint-Gobain used the tool to develop LCA models for multiple product families and to publish EPDs.
• LCA Automation: scales LCAs across a product portfolio and delivers results in minutes.
• LCA for Packaging: a dedicated module that quantifies the environmental impact of packaging and models scenarios for packaging design.
• Training and consulting: Sphera offers regional LCA training in on-demand, group and private formats, along with consulting services to set up or scale an LCA program.
• EPD solutions: Sphera supports EPD generation under EN 15804, ISO 14025 and ISO 21930 and Buy Clean initiatives, with consultants who guide pre-verification with program operators such as The International EPD System and UL.

Pricing

Sphera does not publish prices for LCA for Experts. A 45-day free trial is available with no credit card.

Best for: large companies with in-house LCA specialists. More than 20,000 datasets, LCA Automation and a dedicated packaging module give those teams one environment for expert modeling and product-line automation, and the 45-day trial lets them test it before requesting a quote.

EC3, the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator, is a free, open-access tool with a supporting EPD database. Building Transparency, a Washington State nonprofit formed in 2020, develops it and supports Buy Clean policy at the local, state and federal levels. EC3 focuses on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials. Teams enter material quantities from estimates or BIM models, or by hand, and compare products using third-party verified EPDs, while owners, green building programs and policymakers use the same data to set EPD requirements and embodied carbon limits.

Key features

• EPD database: more than 50,000 third-party verified EPDs are hosted in the tool.
• Material comparison: teams compare the embodied carbon of products and manufacturers and check options against Buy Clean limits.
• Project planning: a building planner and project reporting features track potential and realized embodied carbon at building and portfolio scale.
• Integrations: EC3 integrates with Autodesk Construction Cloud, Bentley iTwin, Procore and cove.tool.

Pricing

EC3 is free to use.

Best for: US construction teams that compare building materials using the EPDs those materials already have. A free database of more than 50,000 EPDs and Buy Clean limit checks make it a practical starting point for specifiers and buyers.

Makersite is LCA automation software that uses AI and knowledge-graph technology to build a digital twin of each product and its supply chain. It starts from the bill of materials, maps each item to data from more than 20 LCA databases, and calculates LCAs, EPDs and PEFs, including ISO 14044 LCAs on ILCD-conformant data from providers such as ecoinvent and IDEA.

Key features

• Digital twin: activity-based modeling builds a detailed twin of each product and its supply chain from the bill of materials and from CAD, ERP and PLM data.
• Automation: LCAs, EPDs and PEFs are generated from that twin.
• Ecodesign scenarios: the platform simulates alternative materials, suppliers and production methods against impact, cost and regulatory criteria.
• Integrations: CAD tools such as Autodesk and Ansys, PLM systems such as Siemens Teamcenter and PTC Windchill, and ERP software connect through native connectors and APIs.
• Reporting: results export to Excel or CSV and feed BI tools such as Tableau, and teams can share interactive LCA data with customers.

Pricing

Makersite offers Pro, Teams and Enterprise plans as 12-month licenses paid annually upfront, and it does not publish prices. The pricing page lists no free tier.

Best for: large manufacturers that hold product data in CAD, ERP and PLM systems. The digital twin, automated LCAs and EPDs, and Teamcenter and Windchill integrations fit companies that want assessments to draw on the product data they already maintain.

Ecochain software is also known as Mobius. It lets manufacturers write LCA reports and EPDs according to EN 15804+A2:2019 and submit the EPDs to program operators such as EPD International, EPD Norge and MRPI-EPD. The software collects the life cycle inventory data and takes primary data from your own operations into the calculations, which strengthens the credibility of the results.

Key features

• Standards: ISO 14040, ISO 14044, ISO 14067, EN 15804+A2 and the Environmental Footprint method.
• Outputs: EPDs, PCFs and LCA reports, with EPD submission to program operators such as EPD International, EPD Norge and MRPI-EPD.
• Data: ecoinvent 3.11 data is included in every plan and in the free trial.

Pricing

Ecochain lists a Professional plan from €290 per month for a single user and up to 20 products, and a Business plan from €640 per month for multiple users and up to 200 products. Enterprise pricing is on request, and prices are published in euros. A 7-day trial is limited to 10 ecoinvent datasets.

Best for: manufacturers that produce EPDs and PCFs. Support for ISO 14040, 14044 and 14067, EN 15804+A2 and the Environmental Footprint method, with ecoinvent 3.11 data included and a plan from €290 per month, works for teams that want standards coverage and data in one subscription.

Earthster is a cloud-based LCA platform from a team of environmental scientists, built to produce LCAs for a whole product portfolio. Teams build a template once and scale it by uploading lists of products. Parameters define what varies in each model, and anybody in the organization can adjust them. It includes impact methods such as ReCiPe 2016, EF 3.1 and TRACI from the US EPA.

Key features

• Data and methods: ecoinvent data, with ReCiPe 2016, EF 3.1, TRACI and IPCC 2021 impact methods, and others on request.
• Templates and batch uploads: build a template once, upload a list of products and get an LCA for each of them.
• Reusable data: each decision is made once and stored in the organization’s own database for every later assessment.
• Collaboration and benchmarks: collaborative models cover the whole life cycle, from supply chain and manufacturing to logistics, use and end of life. Products can be compared with industry benchmarks or with each other, and third-party verification is faster inside the app.
• API: models can be read and updated from other systems.

Pricing

The Professional plan costs €240 per user per month for one user and includes the comparison tool. The Collaborative plan costs €580 per month for three users, with €180 for each additional user, and adds parameters, scenario simulation and supplier data collection. The Corporate plan is priced on request and adds BOM upload, en masse replication of master LCAs, single sign-on and import of LCA models from other software. A free trial is available.

Best for: small and midsize businesses and consultants. Published prices, a free trial and methods such as TRACI from the US EPA serve teams that need a structured tool without negotiating an enterprise contract.

The right tool depends on what you produce and who asks for it: a first LCA with a small team, a product carbon footprint, an EPD for a construction material, or a full expert model.

Which LCA software is best for small and midsize businesses?

Greenly and Earthster suit small and midsize businesses (SMEs), since both pair templates with an interface built for teams without LCA experience. Greenly asks little of a team new to LCA: a short description of the product is enough for EcoPilot to start a draft assessment, and each step waits for your approval. A 30-minute demo shows how that works on your own products, and Earthster offers a free trial and published prices. openLCA is free and fits teams that already have LCA expertise in-house.

What is the best product carbon footprint software?

Greenly, Ecochain and openLCA all support ISO 14067, the standard for product carbon footprints, and ADEME audited Greenly’s method for compliance with it. As PCF software, Ecochain suits manufacturers that want to calculate and share a PCF, and Greenly suits those that need PCFs across a large catalog.

Which EPD software suits construction and Buy Clean?

Ecochain, Greenly and Sphera produce EPDs, and EC3 lets teams compare materials against Buy Clean limits. Construction teams need EPDs because Buy Clean California requires facility-specific EPDs for covered materials.

Which LCA software suits LCA experts?

openLCA, Sphera LCA for Experts and Makersite suit teams that conduct LCAs in-house. openLCA is free and works with USLCI data, Sphera suits large teams, and Makersite automates models from CAD, ERP and PLM data.

In 2026, US demand for LCA data comes from state Buy Clean laws, which require EPDs for construction materials, and from California SB 253, which adds Scope 3 emissions reporting from 2027. The federal Buy Clean programs ended in 2025.

Collecting Scope 3 data from suppliers is the job of supply chain sustainability software, which sits alongside LCA tools.

Expert tools such as openLCA and Sphera are built for teams with modeling skills, while customers and state rules now ask for product footprints and EPDs.

Greenly’s LCA platform is built for that gap. You describe the product or upload a bill of materials, and you confirm the actions EcoPilot proposes. Reports follow ISO 14067 and EPD formats, and ADEME audited the method behind them. Completed LCAs then feed Scope 3 reporting as custom emission factors, which matters as SB 253 requires Scope 3 from 2027. Greenly counts 4,000 clients, from small businesses to enterprises.