Data historians are key to an organization understanding their process, but some clients are worried about purchasing data historians due to cost. This guide will price popular historian options like AVEVA PI, Canary, and Ignition by Inductive Automation. Decide which data historian price is the best value.
Canary, Ignition, and AVEVA PI Pricing
If you are in the market for a data historian, process historian, or enterprise historian, you really need to understand pricing. After all, if the solution isn't cost-effective, will you ever get the capex approval? No one wants to be responsible for overspending on the budget, especially when every company is doing it's absolute best to trim spending. Price is important and is a huge part of ROI. The less you spend and the faster you implement, the better chance you have of a fast ROI. Let's examine, as best we can, the pricing of three very popular historical database options.
Price for the Canary System.
This will be easy. Canary believes in transparent pricing. In fact, you can view the price for a Canary system that fits your needs without even entering an email address.
The Canary system starts at $9,970 for a 3,500 tag historian, and every system size comes standard with the following components:
- OPC, MQTT, SQL, CSV, and SCADA data collection software
- Virtual Views for Asset Modeling
- Calculation Server and Event Monitoring
- Unlimited Axiom client tools for dashboard visualization and trending
- Unlimited Excel Add-in client tools
- Web API, OPC HDA, MQTT Pub, other SCADA and software connectors
If you want to make SQL-like queries against the Canary Historian, you could opt for the ODBC Connector for $2,500.
Finally, an unlimited number of concurrent Axiom clients and Excel Add-ins are included with each historian to maximize the utility of the Canary system for interested users across your organization.
Support and maintenance is 18% of licensed product costs, but is included complimentary for the first year when you are most likely to need it. After the first year, you have the option to renew.
Price for Ignition by Inductive Automation.
The Ignition Historian is offered as a module for the Ignition SCADA solution. Integrators and end users alike love the Ignition Platform because it is very flexible, and scalable, and offers unlimited tags and clients for an incredible price point (I've been to their ICC user group for the past three years, believe me, THEY REALLY LOVE IGNITION).
The Ignition Tag Historian Module may be added to the Ignition SCADA platform for only $2,365. The module provides integration between the Ignition tags and the historical database of your choice. A lot of Ignition projects will take advantage of an SQL database for historical records as it lends itself to further integration with other Ignition components.
SQL has lots of benefits but will require additional database management as a long-term historical solution with high-speed performance.
Canary has developed a module that can be used in conjunction with the Ignition Tag Historian Module that will function as a native Tag History Provider for an Ignition project. The module is free and has no licensing restrictions.
[DOWNLOAD CANARY'S IGNITION MODULE HERE]
Jimmy Hood with DEPCOM Power uses a joint Ignition and Canary solution.
He feels, “Ignition is a big improvement in SCADA integration. Other platforms can run you up in costs and headaches in a hurry. Ignition is very user-friendly, and easy to integrate with every data type, connection, and platform.”
Ignition is known globally and has been very disruptive to the SCADA world. Very positive feedback continues to come from the community, and this platform should definitely be considered for solving your IIoT problems. Like Canary, Ignition works closely with MQTT and Sparkplug to provide for open and vendor agnostic IIoT solutions.
Pricing for AVEVA PI
AVEVA PI has a large market presence and has been highly regarded as a strong solution. They, like Canary, have built their solution around a proprietary NoSQL database. AVEVA does not actively publish pricing on the AVEVA PI website but encourages you to contact an AVEVA PI Sales Representative for a custom quote.
Although public pricing is not available, previously purchased AVEVA PI systems are often made public by utilities. One such utility in Michigan can give a glimpse into the pricing strategy. (Note, we cannot verify the legitimacy of this quote and acknowledge that there could be variables that we are not aware of built into the pricing).
[SEE THE CITY OF HOLLAND PI PROPOSAL]
As it appears, the $162,000 PI solution itemizes tags and clients and also charges for data collection options, as well as the PI System Access (PSA) license which allows you to read PI data with non-PI clients using JDBC, OPC HDA, or Web API.
Pricing Comparison Between Canary, PI, and Ignition
The most dramatic distinction among these three solutions can be seen by example in the comparison between the Canary system pricing and the PI System quote for the City of Holland. At $34,000 (including ODBC), a Canary system equipped with nearly perfect functionality coverage, unlimited Axiom Clients, and a 50% larger tag count is less than one sixth of the cost of a comparable PI System with a smaller tag count.
Here is the system as seen on the Canary pricing page.
[BUILD YOUR OWN CUSTOM CANARY SYSTEM]
You can purchase an entire Ignition SCADA solution for $21,460 with unlimited tags and clients, as well as the Tag Historian Module. You will then need to choose what type of database to use, SQL or NoSQL. Combined, the Canary and Ignition solution would total only $55,460 giving you the ability to not only log historical data but also control your entire operation. This solution when compared to the AVEVA PI pricing in the proposal referenced above is roughly one-third the cost.
Does Paying Less Cost You?
You might be surprised to learn that paying less for the Canary solution doesn't mean you get less value. In fact, Canary has class-leading loss-less data compression and can handle more than 2 million tags on a single server.
[DOWNLOAD THE WHITEPAPER AND LEARN MORE]
