# Brightway Software Framework

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```{warning}
This version of the documentation is for older releases of Brightway (`legacy` or `brightway2`). It includes only those pages which are relevant to the legacy releases. To access the complete documentation, please switch to the [latest version](https://docs.brightway.dev/en/latest/). The legacy releases [supports the popular Activity Browser user interface](content/setup/ui.md), but do not have the latest features of Brightway. You can learn more about [the different versions of Brightway here](content/faq/brightway.md).
```

## What is Brightway?

Brightway is an open-source software package for [life cycle assessment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment) (LCA) and [environmental impact assessment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_assessment) written in the [Python](https://www.python.org/) programming language. LCA is a method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a product, process, or service. It involves analyzing all of the inputs and outputs of a system, including raw materials, energy use, and waste products, and quantifying the environmental impacts of these inputs and outputs over the entire lifecycle of the system. 

## What can Brightway do?

Brightway is designed to make it easy to work with large datasets and perform LCA calculations quickly and accurately. It thus provides a powerful tool for anyone interested in performing LCA or evaluating the environmental impacts of products and processes. Brightway is not intended to replace software like _SimaPro_ or _OpenLCA_, but instead offers possibilities to break the limits of conventional LCA. Brightway is especially attractive for researchers, especially when used with [Jupyter notebooks](https://jupyter.org/).

```{toctree}
---
hidden:
maxdepth: 1
---
content/installation/installation
content/gettingstarted/index
content/api/index
content/faq/faq
content/changelog/index
```