SystematicsLab is a browser-based character matrix editor and parsimony analysis application designed primarily for evolutionary biology courses. It allows students to create and edit taxon-by-character matrices, define discrete character states and character ordering, and import and export standard phylogenetic data files. The format uses the NEXUS format. Because of the inefficiency of the parsimony implementation, the datafiles and analyses are limited to 30 terminals and 30 characters.

A browser-approach was chosen because it allows all students to be able to access the software on virtually any web-connected device.