Ignition vs. Wonderware Part 2

Oct 14

A few short years ago, Wonderware was the hottest SCADA software on the market. In the past few years things have changed dramatically as Inductive Automation has developed their reputation over many releases and is one of the most popular choices for manufacturing companies choosing a new SCADA platform. While in a lot of ways Ignition is a more user friendly and easy to implement option, you might want an unbiased opinion and we are going to do our best to give you an apples to apples comparison of both platforms. If you missed Part 1, please read it here.

Security

Security management and implementation is roughly similar in all modern SCADA platforms. They allow you to configure users and roles, apply these users and roles to anything in your projects, and cover the basics of what you would expect a security system to handle for you.

They both support Active Directory, which makes sense as they both run on Windows.

Ignition takes the lead in allowing you to tie into just about any Identity Provider on the market giving you full granularity and control over how you run your user management. For example Corso Systems uses Google Workspace and has all of our internal Ignition servers tied into our Google accounts. We have also used Keycloak, Okta, and other OpenID providers without any hassles in the past.

Contrast this with Wonderware which now offers AVEVA AIM Identity Provider integration, which ties you into an AVEVA authentication system. Yes you could write your own Identity Provider Integrations using .NET, we do not recommend taking on security to that degree when it is a solved problem in the rest of the technology world.

Winner: Ignition. Wonderware has been sold twice in the last 10 years, so tying your company into a non-standard Identity Provider has some inherent risk and Ignition has openness and transparency built-into their ethos.

Redundancy

Both Wonderware and Ignition offer redundancy architectures. For a basic system this will be a main and a backup gateway with automated failover. You can also use software running on different machines to build up Edge architectures, use virtual machine failover, or even use Docker for enterprise scale deployments.

For someone doing a “standard” control system:

Winner: Tie, although we’d give a slight edge to Ignition for their pricing model

For someone doing a “complex” control system:

Winner: Ignition. You have more options and the cost structure will be much easier to understand.

Support

Ignition support has a few of tiers. Working with Corso, we will answer and fix (almost) all of your problems as the integrator familiar with your system. Email support from Inductive Automation is part of their Basic care package. Phone support is part of their total care package. There is also a really informative online forum we use heavily. You can now also get access to Priority Support giving you front of line access.

Please note that with all of their care packages, you get version upgrades included.

Wonderware support is provided by distributors, so is entirely dependent on the distributor in your region. If Corso was working on your system, we would be the main point of contact, otherwise we can’t give a definitive answer on their support for everyone as it is dependent on where you are.

Winner: Ignition. They provide their own support, and you don’t have to deal with a distributor to get access to their developers.

Backups

Both have the ability to take on-demand an automated backups. There are different options to backup your servers as well as pushing data to the cloud for additional analysis. A lot of backup policies and procedures are handled by IT, so we are going to call this one a tie.

Winner: Backups are easy with both systems, and are usually handled by IT so this isn’t really a deciding factor in our recommendations to customers.

The Clear Winner

We believe Ignition is the clear winner if you are choosing between Ignition and Wonderware for your SCADA implementation.

Can Ignition Do Everything Wonderware Can Do?

The places where Wonderware excels over Ignition is in data compression on the Historian side, which is not generally an issue for 95% of all projects we have done, and the ability to drop in .NET objects and components into the architecture. This is not something we have ever been limited by, but is something that cannot be done in Ignition.

Ignition excels in the ease of development, configuration, and deployment with a more straightforward architecture being developed from the ground up, and in our experience has a better support ecosystem.

Personally we would pick Ignition over Wonderware if given a choice today. Wonderware was the primary option on our list in 2010, but after Schneider bought them, their development has stagnated. Then, after AVEVA bought them, they added a ton of additional layers of complexity to tie into the AVEVA software management ecosystem. Now, they are not trying to innovate like Ignition has been doing since day one.

Can Wonderware do everything Ignition can do?

Not even by a long shot. Back in 2013 or 2014 the answer was a strong “maybe”, although running on Linux or Macs would be out of the question. With no real innovation happening in the Wonderware world since the early 2010’s it isn’t even a fair fight at this point.