The biodb package provides access to standard remote chemical and biological databases (ChEBI, KEGG, HMDB, ...), as well as to in-house local database files (CSV, SQLite), with easy retrieval of entries, access to web services, search of compounds by mass and/or name, and mass spectra matching for LCMS and MSMS. Its architecture as a development framework facilitates the development of new database connectors for local projects or inside separate published packages.