Who are the flow cytometry instrument suppliers to watch?
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- We give an overview of the flow cytometry market leaders and CiteAb’s new instrument dataset
- Dig into the growth trajectories of Cytek Biosciences and Sony Biotech
- Download data on the top 5 flow cytometry suppliers in 2025
CiteAb identifies and understands reagent and instrument use across life science publications, powering search tools for scientists and data services for suppliers, pharma companies and investors.
The flow cytometry market is an active and growing space, with over 500,000 citations in our database.
While established leaders continue to dominate the market, our latest data analysis reveals a wave of challengers. These include Cytek Biosciences and Sony Biotech.
Dig into the analysis below and download data on the top 5 flow cytometry suppliers’ share in 2025 freely at the bottom of this blog, to help benchmark your performance and inform strategy.
The new instrument database underpinning our flow cytometry market analysis
Given the wide-spread use of high value instruments in the life sciences, we built out our data collection in this space – culminating in the launch of our new instrument dataset this year!
Our instrument database is curated via the same high-quality pipeline as the rest of CiteAb’s reagent data, which combines human reviewing with AI-driven text mining technology.
This pipeline, built on over a decade of innovation, gives a unique, highly accurate and quantitative view of instrument use in scientific publications. We cover 57 different types of instruments, including microscopes, mass spectrometers, and, of course, flow cytometers.
Citation data provides a leading indicator of future purchasing trends, as well as a reliable marker of past sales, and can be split by country, research area, institution and much more for both broad and granular insights.
Get in touch to discuss our instrument data solutions.
An overview of the flow cytometry market leaders
Taking a broad view of our instrument data for flow cytometers, we found that – perhaps unsurprisingly – BD Bioscience has convincingly led the space for many years.
The company was recently acquired by Waters, and are now known as Waters Biosciences.
- You can read our analysis into the BD-Waters deal here. We share what our citation data shows about company positioning and how this deal could impact the market.
Retaining impressive citation counts in the market for many years, our data shows their share is declining slightly whilst clearly maintaining overall dominance.
Taking in data from 2020-2024, Beckman Coulter and Thermo Fisher Scientific joined Waters Bioscience in the top three by citation share respectively.
Beckman Coulter, the second most cited supplier in the market, were recently named as the winners in the Flow Cytometer Supplier to Watch Award in the 2026 CiteAb Awards. This Award recognised their rapid growth in the market.
Beckman sees the majority of flow cytometer citations from the CytoFLEX portfolio/platform – which they credit with ease-of-use and scalability.
Thermo Fisher Scientific, the third ranked supplier, holds a share of around 4% of the market.
They have been remaining active in the flow space over the years to maintain this position. In 2021, they acquired Propel Lab’s Bigfoot cell sorter. Following this, they saw a growing share. They also launched their spectral flow cytometer, Attune Xenith, in 2025. We will be interested to see if this plays into their growth trajectory in the future.
Beyond these household names in the top three, our data is picking up significant movement in citation share for other companies.
Which flow cytometry suppliers are showing significant growth?
Sony Biotech – Consistent growth in a competitive market
Ranking as the fourth most cited supplier in 2024, Sony Biotech are a strong player in the flow cytometer space. They focus on flow cytometry and imaging instrumentation, reagents and services.
Sony were the first to launch a commercial spectral flow cytometer in 2013.
These instrument types have seen increasing adoption over the years. They enable high sensitivity, help with autofluorescence challenges, and offer more multiplexing capabilities.
Building on this launch, Sony have continued to respond to the increased demand in spectral flow cytometry with new products. These include the ID7000 in 2019 and FP7000 in 2023. In total, they saw five instruments in the top 50 products in 2024.
Overall, they have remained competitive in this evolving market as evidenced through their growing share.
Cytek Biosciences – Rapid expansion to move up the rankings
Cytek Biosciences focuses on flow cytometry products and services to support researchers and clinicians globally.
They have seen rapid growth in recent years, which earnt them the ‘Highly Commended’ title in the CiteAb Awards in the Flow Cytometer to Watch Category. This was awarded for the second-largest increase in citations in 2024 compared to the previous year.
Responding to the increasing popularity of spectral flow cytometry, Cytek launched their Aurora product in 2017. This instrument now ranks in the top 20 products in the market and makes up the majority of their citations.
They have built on this success with the launch of Aurora Evo in 2025.
Will this new product launch help them continue to grow their share and challenge the top two players?
What does this mean for flow cytometry suppliers?
Understanding the competitive landscape of the flow cytometry market helps suppliers inform sales and marketing strategies, identify business opportunities for differentiation and growth into new markets, and benchmark performance.
This data analysis has shown that the flow cytometry market is far from static, with room for suppliers to grow their share considerably.
Download the data and meet us at AAI
You can freely download a sample of our flow cytometry market dataset below. It covers the top 5 suppliers in 2025 by citation share.
If you’re curious to learn more about this dataset or chat to the team in more detail, we’ll be attending AAI in Boston this April – get in touch here.
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We will be revisiting this dynamic and growing market in the future, reporting back on trends and areas to watch. To stay up to date with our latest analysis, sign up to our newsletter below!
