How does Thingworx compare to Ignition

Does anyone have experience with Thingworx? We have a plant that has invested heavily in FactoryTalkView for the HMI and Thingworx to collect the data. Thingworx bills itself as an IoT software, not really SCADA.

Help me promote Ignition, please!

Ignition > Thingworx. We are currently going through the process of converting our IoT system from Thingworx to Ignition due to $$ and features.

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After using both products at different companies - definitely go with Ignition!
Ignition has a better IDE, better learning resources, better technical support and better online resources.

Ignition updates typically take minutes while Thingworx updates take days or months.

Thingworx has more failure points and is more complicated to install and maintain, especially if you are taking over a project written by someone else or maintaining something that is a year+ old.

The learning curve for Thingworx is very steep but most people can be productive with Ignition almost immediately.
With Thingworx What You See Is NOT What You Get
Ignition is very close to WYSIWYG (with a few exceptions)

System restart/recovery after a power outage with Ignition is very rarely a problem. Thingworx almost always needs manual help at some level.

Pricing on Thingworx is difficult to understand (based on users, tags, etc.) and in general, the startup cost seems to be 10x the cost of Ignition. Thingworx is an annual subscription at the same rate as the initial cost. Ignition pricing is simple and annual support is a percentage of the initial cost.

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Wait, what ?
How ?

Thingworx has multiple layers of dependencies with Tomcat, Kepware, OPC Aggregator, Extensions, etc.
It takes a lot of time to build a test environment, move everything to it, reconnect everything, rebuild your application and regression test everything. Bigger projects take longer.

Thingworx backward compatibility is poor.

Deprecated widgets just stop working or are automatically removed and need to be rebuilt. There is no copy/paste for widgets - compare every part of a mashup side by side with an older version and manually rebuild anything that broke. The new replacement widgets are littered with properties from their predecessors that no longer apply.

With the exception of changes between Ignition 7.9 to 8.0 that were well documented, I've never had to rewrite an application for an update like have been necessary for even minor releases of Thingworx.
Upgrade + Verify != Upgrade + Rewrite + 100% Regression Test

The bottom line for me: I trust Ignition updates, I do not trust Thingworx updates.

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Sounds like Thingworx hired Rockwell developers. :slight_smile:

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Thingbarelyworx ?

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