What is the difference between Aveva and Ignition? Which one is better?
I personally used Ignition only and I loved it, it is very user-friendly, however, the people I am working with are using Aveva and they are willing to switch to other SCADA software like Ignition but they need to know the difference between the two. Any experience you could share?
Thank you!
I don’t know the answer here, but this topic might offer some insight.
Better than Ignition. Any SCADA? - General Discussion - Inductive Automation Forum
Thank you @dkhayes117. Appreciate it!
I once spoke to a salesperson for Aveva regarding a trial to test out the software for my self. His entire sales pitch was “You dont need an integrator for our software.” Then I once I told him I was an integrator and using Ignition. He told me Ignition almost put them out of business, they had to change their whole structure. Then he proceeded to kick me off the call. so idk. Just spoke with an integrator who uses aveva regulary and enjoys it. but just because thats what most of his customers have.
The big difference is in Ignition you are free and it is fun to do almost anything but in AVEA WW most of the thing is fixed but easy to use.
For example imagine you need to connect to ARCGIS to get power grid lines and display on map and make the color dynamic base on some tags.
You need to design your own UX/UI and coding for connection and every thing else. Which is almost easy and fun to do and make you feel good about yourself.
In AVEA it is done by some wizard and done!!! Just some clicks.
But whatever they prepare for you is what you usually get and there is no option to edit it.
To change and add feature to it is very hard.
For the pricing unfortunately the IA is going to reaching them and every year they increase it and who knows if IA get full market, may be they increase price substantially. This is business after all.
The historian is another thing which AVEA is very good compare to Ignition.
They also implemented full object oriented method in your design. So you capsulate every thing on object like tags, faceplate, popup, alarms, history, symbol,…
In Ignition you create UDT for tags as object and embedded views for visual and popup in different places. So managing them is harder compare to AVEA WW.
At the end for us as system integrator our first choice is Ignition and we love it. For the client who see the end result it is different story.
So as integrator it is better we cater for both Aveva PI and Ignition
I would recommend against AVEVA in general. I've been working with what used to be Wonderware since 2014. They're a mega company that gobbles up tech they think they want and tries to smash some of it together. Looking at you System platform + MES + Skelta BPM. The documentation is wrong/old/missing/in 5 places, there's no community, support has become unusable and the talent puddle is only getting smaller. I could list a couple dozen more red flags, but this isn't a full in rant.
I'm not familiar with all of AVEVA's products, but from what I've seen on my side, they're too big to make meaningful change quickly.
If you do adopt their products, I recommend having a replacement plan as well. Some products disappear or stop getting updates. Licensing is a nightmare too.
I called at a site that had WW, they paid 20K per year in support alone. It wasn't a big site.
Got to see some of the back-end, for a label "Valve Open"/"Valve Closed" they had two objects on top of each other with visibility bindings. So to change/update they had to drag them out of the way to get to the one they wanted.
Later, in the engineering room, I heard one guy say to another "Can you close your historian app because I want to check something and we have reached our limit on open sessions".