Factry Historian and Canary Historian get shortlisted for the same job: a vendor-neutral process historian that collects plant data reliably and serves it back fast. Both buffer data on disk during network outages and both work with Ignition. Where they really differ is how you pay and where your data lives.
How they price
- Factry charges one flat fee per production site, with unlimited users, tags, collectors and integrations, in Standard, Advanced and Enterprise tiers. Historian prices aren't published; Factry offers a guided proof of concept.
- Canary licenses by tag count, perpetual or annual subscription, and publishes a price calculator. At 3,500 tags it showed US$7,400 perpetual plus US$1,330 CustomerCare, or US$3,000/year as a subscription (checked Oct 2026). Enterprise licensing covers unlimited tags.
If you have many tags per site, the flat fee is easier to forecast. If you want to price it yourself before talking to sales, Canary's calculator wins.
Collection and buffering
- Factry has collectors for OPC UA, OPC DA, MQTT (JSON and Sparkplug B), Modbus TCP, Siemens S7, SQL and REST, all with store and forward.
- Canary has collectors for OPC UA, OPC DA, MQTT Sparkplug B 2.2/3.0 (or JSON), SQL and CSV, plus gRPC and a Web API for custom collectors. Collectors aren't licensed separately, and its Store & Forward service backfills automatically and can push to several historians.
Storage and deployment
- Factry stores time series in InfluxDB (v1.x or v2.x) with PostgreSQL for configuration, metadata and events. It runs on practically any Linux OS, on-prem, in a corporate data center (hub and spoke) or in the cloud, and has an official open-source Grafana datasource.
- Canary uses its own daily HDB files, losslessly compressed, and never down-samples or interpolates. It's self-hosted, or Canary Private Cloud on US Azure from US$12,320/year. The Axiom trending client is included and an ODBC connector is an upgrade for BI tools.
Quick fit check
Pick Factry if your team already runs InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, Linux and Grafana and you want a predictable per-site fee with no tag counting.
Pick Canary if you want a self-managed historian with its own lossless storage, unlicensed collectors and no separate database to administer.
The full side-by-side table with every source link is on PlantWired: Factry Historian vs Canary Historian. Related: Canary vs AVEVA PI, Canary vs InfluxDB, Canary vs Proficy Historian, 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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