I have decided to move away from ignition, and have a bunch of Edge licenses.
Am I allowed to sell them, or return them in for a refund ?
Thanks
huh, not sure I've ever seen this asked before.
According to Inductive Automation Master Software License Agreement the answer might be no, at least not without permission from IA (ask your sales rep? no idea).
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Moving away from Ignition. Never heard that from anyone. It's always the other way around. I'd be curious as to why.
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Full Ignition is expensive and it’s hard to convince someone that they don’t need more than 35 days of Historian or that the 2 Edge clients will be enough. That and email-only notification. We have a way to notify operators of alarms using another piece of hardware, but at that point we may as well also use our own internal cloud-based visualization software that also provides remote access to the site at the same time.
Hi Virgar,
Your post caught my eye because I’m actually moving in the exact opposite direction!
I’ve spent the last 15 years as an engineer in the Solar and BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) industry, but I recently decided to pivot my career entirely into Industrial Automation. I’m currently investing all my focus and resources into the Ignition ecosystem—I just recently completed my Core Certification—as I see it as a cornerstone for the future of the field.
Purely out of professional curiosity, what motivated your decision to move away from Ignition? Did you run into specific technical hurdles, or did you find another platform that better fits your requirements? Hearing from someone who has been deep enough into it to own multiple Edge licenses would be incredibly insightful for me as I start this new chapter.
Best of luck with the licenses and your next steps!
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Expensive? Have you ever priced out Wonderware/AVEVA System Platform? The Ignition licenses for our one customer are less than $40k for the perpetual license with unlimited clients, historian, reporting, alarm notifications, redundancy, ABB Totalflow drivers, and premium support. The closest equivalent for WWSP for 2 redundant local clients with historian and access anywhere for remote access is $60k/year plus an additional $8k/year for Kepware to talk to everything. Plus SQL Server licensing. They didn't have any reporting or alarm notification with WWSP. That makes Ignition a steal.
Edit: I'm also wondering if they're migrating entirely off of Ignition or just moving from Edge to Standard. OP makes it sound like entirely off of Ignition.
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I feel like santa clause when I migrate systems from Wonderware/AVEVA to Ignition. Not only are they saving a ton of money on activations but it works better and has more flexibility. It’s an easy sell. The only hangup seems to be that Wonderware/AVEVA customers often think it’s too good to be true. Then when you execute it they see it’s just how it is.
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AVEVA, yes that is ridiculous. We don’t use AVEVA at all. The main competitor is FT SE which has gotten more competitive lately. Don’t get me wrong, I highly prefer Ignition but my project estimator does not.
My other selling point is that I can develop and test the project in probably half the time in Ignition vs FactoryTalk or Wonderware. Considering we're charging $180-200+ per hour, it can add up fast.
I also think that all the other HMI/SCADA software is just archaic. They've been around so long and just keep trying to add features to an aging code base without breaking old projects. IA tries to adapt and improve their product beyond just bolting on some new GUI. 8.3 is a testament to that where the entire backend and the gateway interface was reworked to be more modern. Wonderware is still using InTouch but with a prettier toolbar and menus then before in WindowMaker. FactoryTalk is just an improved version of RSView32 from way back in the day (now I'm aging myself). They did do rework when it switched to FactoryTalk, but it hasn't changed much since. Yeah they still all work, but you can install something that looks and feels the same as it did 20 years ago but takes an hour to install or Ignition that's way more modern and takes less then 5 minutes to install.
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Absolutely agree. My latest Ignition project would’ve taken 50x longer in FactoryTalk vs Ignition due to the complexity of the system and the sheer number of individual HMIs.
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Yuck 
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As someone who oversees PV/BESS SCADA and multiple gigawatts of projects, this is the first I’ve ever heard of someone moving out of our corner of SCADA when we need as many people as we can moving into this space. This thread is full of lots of new things.
I appreciate the insight. My situation is a bit unique because my decision to pivot wasn't entirely voluntary.
I spent 15 years building my career in Solar and BESS in Gaza, but the war destroyed my home, my business, and the infrastructure I worked on. I had to leave everything behind—first displacing to Egypt, and now restarting my life here in Oman.
Moving into the Ignition ecosystem is my way of rebuilding my professional identity from scratch. I’m bringing my 15 years of experience with me, but applying it in a new direction that makes sense for my new reality.
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For those who are interested
The HMI in the video is created with Ignition Edge.
The HMI is communicating with the doors deep in the see, which is a slow connection. And this is the first hurdle.
We also have a centralized ignition, which collects (if it would work) data from all the edge devices.
The data-rate on this fishing vessels is slow, and not sure if that was the show stopper for collecting data through ignition or not.
I’ve contacted support about this, and they didn’t want to give me any support to get this up and running. They threw a “you-can-get-one-curtesy-call” at me… and that was just not what I was expecting from a supplier, where I’ve spent A LOT of money on their product.
It’s well worth spending a bit more money to get support - it’s not just about free upgrades, it’s about having the best tech support of any software company out there.
Impressive video - makes me want to be a Skipper (well…, not really).
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I mean, if the project doesn’t need to do much, it might make sense cost wise. But as soon as you need to do anything even remotely smart, it makes 0 sense since you’re comparing Paint to Photoshop.
Ask the estimator if he’d rather use Notepad to write his documents in, or Word. Then tell him you’d prefer if he used Notepad. And then when he starts with “but then I can't… “ you can say ”Exactly!“
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Well, I for one have a customer project with over 100 sites dialling in remotely with Edge (MQTT) for the newer sites, OpenVPN for the older sites, and we’ve been collecting data for 10 years now. The server is now in AWS, so not even in the same country.
Slow polling should be easier to achieve consistency with than super fast (<200mS) polling.
If Inductive support aren’t being as helpful as you think they should (which surprises me as they’ve helped me in the early days before I even had licenses for customers), then perhaps another strategy would be to reach out to an experienced Integrator for some consultancy on how to make your Edge Sync work properly, rather than abandoning it all at this stage?
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I don’t think this problem would be resolved by changing HMI’s
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Frustrating, sure... While I do wish there was a longer grace period for 'new license purchases' (currently, 90 days of support is included with purchase of a new license), I can't otherwise think of a better process to keep IA support staff employed long-term.
Luckily, you have a chance at getting decent support (sometimes better, sometimes worse) by posting your issue here on the forums.
Is your issue with Ignition Edge device communicating with devices deep in the sea, or issue connecting Edge <--> Central/Full gateway? In my experience, Ignition hasn't been the greatest option for polling end devices over high latency, low bandwidth connections. But, there might be a lot of options for making that work - are you able to share more info about the devices in the sea? Are you able to change the method/protocol by which you obtain data from those devices? Perhaps setting up a UDP listener on the Edge gateway to receive a stream from the end device would suffice?
Re: Edge <--> Full comms: Ignition Edge permits at least two methods for communicating data between gateways. The default is GAN (native Ignition protocol), the alternative is MQTT (a Sparkplug B implementation via 3rd party MQTT transmission module - included with all Edge licenses). The MQTT protocol is recommended for use in high-latency connections, especially if few 'advanced features' are required.
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Don't forget about just using OPC-UA also!
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