Ignition

Ignition from Inductive Automation is an industrial application platform for SCADA, human machine interfaces, reporting and more, and its licensing model is the reason it disrupted this market. Rather than charging per tag, per client or per screen as traditional SCADA vendors do, Ignition sells unlimited licensing per server.

That difference compounds at scale. A conventional SCADA deployment becomes more expensive with every tag added and every operator station connected, which pushes engineers toward designing around the licence rather than around the process. Unlimited licensing removes that constraint entirely, so the system can be built as the plant actually needs it.

Pricing is published in full, which is rare in industrial automation. The Industrial Application Platform is 13,500 US dollars and allows powerful mobile responsive industrial applications including SCADA, HMI and reporting. Solution Suites are priced separately: Historian at 3,500 dollars for time series data management, Alarm Management at 3,200 dollars for advanced alarm notifications, DataOps at 5,500 dollars for event driven management and custom web development tools, and Enterprise integration at 4,100 dollars. An application platform at 1,200 dollars is required for each Solution Suite, and the Siemens Enhanced Driver carries an additional cost.

Other editions cover different deployments: Ignition Cloud Edition, Ignition Edge for field devices and a free Maker Edition for personal use. Training runs through Inductive University with certification, and the Ignition Community Conference anchors an unusually active user community.