Factry Historian pitches itself as a replacement for legacy historians. AVEVA PI System (formerly OSIsoft PI) is the historian a lot of plants already run. Both buffer data through network outages, and neither publishes historian prices. The real differences are how you pay, what it runs on, and how much of the ecosystem you need.
How they price
- Factry charges one flat fee per production site, with unlimited users, tags, collectors and integrations, in Standard, Advanced and Enterprise tiers. Prices are on request, and Factry offers a guided proof of concept.
- AVEVA PI is sold as a subscription through AVEVA PI Data Infrastructure, paid with AVEVA Flex credits: per-server subscriptions or an aggregate tag subscription shared across servers. Prices are on request and contracts go through an AVEVA account rep.
Scale and collection
- Factry sets no limits on tags or users; capacity depends on the infrastructure you run it on. Collectors cover OPC UA, OPC DA, MQTT (JSON and Sparkplug B), Modbus TCP, Siemens S7, SQL and REST, and they store and forward to disk until the historian acknowledges the data.
- AVEVA PI says a single PI Server can manage up to 20 million tags. It has over 450 PI Interfaces and over 20 PI Connectors, plus AVEVA Adapters (OPC UA, Modbus TCP, BACnet, DNP3, MQTT including Sparkplug B). The PI Buffer Subsystem queues data to a local file and flushes it in order when the connection comes back.
Storage and deployment
- Factry stores time series in InfluxDB (v1.x or v2.x) and configuration, metadata and events in PostgreSQL. It runs on practically any Linux OS, on-prem, in a corporate data center or in the cloud.
- AVEVA PI uses PI Data Archive for time series, and PI Asset Framework (assets, analytics, event frames) needs Microsoft SQL Server. PI Data Archive 2024 runs in production on Windows Server 2022, 2019 or 2016, with edge, on-prem and CONNECT cloud components around it.
Visualization and outputs
- Factry has an official Grafana datasource plugin, a Seeq connector, an Excel add-in, MQTT (Sparkplug B) output, Parquet export and a REST API.
- AVEVA PI offers optional add-ons such as PI Vision (web displays), PI DataLink (Excel) and PI Integrator for Business Analytics, plus open APIs and an SDK.
Quick fit check
Pick Factry if you want a predictable per-site fee with no tag counting, your team is comfortable with Linux, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL and Grafana, and you want direct database access.
Pick AVEVA PI if you need a long-established enterprise historian with hundreds of interfaces, asset framework, event frames and notifications, and your IT standard is Windows Server and SQL Server.
The full side-by-side table with every source link is on PlantWired: Factry Historian vs AVEVA PI System. Related: Factry vs Canary Historian, Factry vs InfluxDB, Canary vs AVEVA PI, and the guide Choosing a process historian.
Our data comes from public vendor pages and surely has gaps. If you run either in production and something's wrong, tell us in the comments and we'll fix it.
PlantWired is a free, vendor-neutral map of factory software. A short weekly brief on new integrations is at plantwired.vercel.app.
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