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The BCI Briefing

Acquisition & device interfaces · Acquisition

BrainFlow

One API for acquiring EEG, EMG and other biosignals from many different boards.

  • Active
  • Widely used
  • Real-time ready
github.com/brainflow-dev/brainflow (opens in a new tab)Documentation (opens in a new tab)

What problem does it solve?

Every amplifier has its own SDK. BrainFlow hides the differences so the same code runs across devices.

Who is it for?

Application developers and labs supporting more than one headset

At a glance

Primary use
Acquisition & device interfaces
Licence
MIT · permissive
Language
C++ core; Python, Java, C#, Rust and more
Current release
5.23.0, published 26 Sep 2026
Development activity
Last commit 28 Sep 2026 · repository created 15 Jul 2018
Maintainers
BrainFlow developers
GitHub stars
1,770 as of 3 Oct 2026

Repository facts are a snapshot read from the GitHub API on 3 Oct 2026; they are reported as found, not scored.

Supported modalities and use

Modalities

Real-time capability

Designed for or usable in real-time loops

Common use cases

  • Device-agnostic acquisition
  • Synthetic boards for testing
  • Basic filtering and denoising

How it fits into a BCI stack

  1. Hardware

    2 tools

  2. Acquisition

    BrainFlow

  3. Streaming

    3 tools

  4. Processing

    6 tools

  5. Decoding

    4 tools

  6. Applications

    2 tools

  7. Data & standards

    3 tools

Getting started

pip install brainflow, then start a session with the synthetic board to verify the pipeline before attaching hardware.

Official documentation (opens in a new tab)

Sources

  1. 01

    github.com/brainflow-dev/brainflow (opens in a new tab)

    Open-source repositoryGitHubChecked against source 3 Oct 2026

    Repository metadata read from the GitHub API.