Ignition Cloud Edition

What do you like best about the product?

I use Ignition for SCADA applications, and I find it great at connecting multiple factory devices and databases to create an HMI. It's amazing how it helps connect PLCs and other factory devices to a single system where I can view data and control through an HMI. One of the things I like the most about Ignition is how easy it is to begin using it. Once I got used to it, diving deep and learning to accomplish complex tasks became easy. The flexibility of the system is a huge plus, allowing me to implement what a client asks for with ease due to the big community and a wide amount of resources available. The initial setup was very easy as well.

What do you dislike about the product?

The reporting module is not as intuitive as the other modules.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Ignition connects PLCs or other factory devices to a single system, making data viewing and control through an HMI easy. It's flexible and has a large community with many resources, making implementation straightforward. Once familiar, handling complex tasks becomes simple.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like most about Ignition is its unlimited licensing and open architecture. It gives you unlimited tags, clients, and designers while supporting open technologies like OPC UA, MQTT, SQL, and Python, making it easy to scale from a small project to an enterprise solution.

What do you dislike about the product?

Ignition gives you enormous flexibility, but that also means you often have to build more of the solution yourself compared to some industry-specific SCADA platforms

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Ignition solves the problem of disconnected industrial data and expensive, restrictive SCADA systems. It brings machines, PLCs, databases, and enterprise systems together on one platform, helping me deploy solutions faster, scale without licensing headaches, and give customers better access to their data

What do you like best about the product?

I am using Ignition to integrate over 200 remote edge units, and I love its scalability because I can apply a standard design to multiple iterations with minimal need for redesign. I really like its ability to work with CS tools and how it smoothly combines with Docker and VS Code, allowing me to manage my Docker containers from a unified directory and make global changes using the open API. The initial setup was very easy for my team, thanks to the core class that helped us get up to speed.

What do you dislike about the product?

Ever since version 8.3 launched, there have been weird, one-off performance issues that don’t occur often enough to really remember or document, but there are still some bugs in 8.3 that have caused me to do some rework.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Ignition allows me to apply a standard design across multiple iterations with minimal redesign. It integrates well with Docker and VS Code, enabling me to make global changes and run commands from a unified directory.

What do you like best about the product?

Freedom in development, with no limitations.
Easy integration with PLCs, OPC UA, SQL databases, and third-party systems.
Seamless integration with SQL databases.
Powerful Perspective visualization capabilities for web applications.
Simple yet powerful Python scripting.
Comprehensive Ignition documentation: Inductive University and the User Manual.

What do you dislike about the product?

Rather than drawbacks, these are areas with room for improvement:
Some components could offer more built-in functionality (e.g., charts).
In some cases, custom components need to be developed.
Some advanced features require an initial learning curve and hands-on experience (e.g., Perspective Responsive Design).

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It enables the use of the same platform for any project, from the smallest to the most complex, helping to:

Reduce development time.
Standardize projects.
Reuse code and components.
Easily connect and integrate different systems.
Efficiently manage SCADA applications, including large and highly complex architectures.
Simplify project maintenance and future enhancements.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that you have a toolkit to help with development, but aren't limited by that. You can do anything. It really solves all the problems. And the community is there to help, so you're not developing in isolation.

What do you dislike about the product?

It can be challenging because there are so many ways to solve something. It's up to the user to have guardrails and use best practices to make sure you don't pin yourself in a corner.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

All of them! It's helping me solve MES problems for a few different clients. It's helping with digitizing work flows, providing metrics and dashboards for decision making.

What do you like best about the product?

The license model, the freedom of creating what ever you want, the stability, AI integrations, Web-based and deployed, endles integration possibilities, and not to forget, the fantastic company behind it, Inductive Automation!

What do you dislike about the product?

At the moment nothing else that I am surprised that so many companies still using old legacy SCADA.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It is the best SCADA system in the world, it integrates with anything and the license model makes it affordable for everyone.

What do you like best about the product?

The licensing model is the single biggest thing. Unlimited tags, unlimited clients, unlimited connections for one price means I never had to design around a tag count or worry that adding a sensor would cost more. Coming from a student budget that mattered, but it also means the architecture decisions I made were driven by what the process needed rather than what the license allowed.

Perspective being genuinely web-based is the other standout. No client installs, no per-seat licensing, and the same project renders on a laptop and a phone without me building it twice.

The Modbus TCP driver being native meant I had an ESP32 talking to a real SCADA platform in an afternoon. Database integration is built into the platform rather than bolted on, so when I built an ISA-18.2 alarm journal on PostgreSQL, I could bind custom components directly to SQL queries and build exactly the analytics dashboard I wanted instead of accepting stock components.

Inductive University deserves a mention too. Over 600 free videos with a real credential at the end is a genuinely serious training resource, and it's free to anyone with an account.

What do you dislike about the product?

The failure modes that cost me the most time were the silent ones. A tag carrying a scaled decimal value set to Integer instead of Float truncates without any warning or error, so 0.3 just becomes 0 and everything downstream looks fine until you notice the numbers are wrong. Same category of problem with bidirectional writes: the tag being writable isn't enough, the binding needs Bidirectional explicitly ticked in the Options row, and if you miss it the write just doesn't happen with nothing to indicate why.

Named Queries have a similar sharp edge. A trailing semicolon breaks them because Ignition appends its own LIMIT clause, and the resulting error doesn't point anywhere near the actual cause. Scalar queries also return under the key "result" rather than the alias you named in the SQL, which isn't obvious.

Debugging bindings is harder than it should be. There's no straightforward way to see every binding across a view at once, so a stray binding silently overwriting a property is painful to track down.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I'm a mechatronics engineering student, so the problem I'm solving is skills-gap rather than commercial: getting hands-on experience with real industrial SCADA before entering a job market where employers expect it and universities rarely teach it.

Concretely, I built a benchtop tank-level control system where an ESP32 reads an ultrasonic level sensor, drives two pumps under closed-loop control, and serves the data over Modbus TCP. Ignition is the supervisory layer on top of that: live process visualisation built to ISA-101 high-performance HMI conventions, historian trending, operator setpoint writes, and an ISA-18.2 alarm management layer with a PostgreSQL alarm journal, rationalised priorities, suppression logic, and analytics that rank bad actors and measure time-in-alarm.

The benefit is that I've learned the standards by implementing them rather than reading about them. Working out why a sensor fault should suppress the level alarms it causes, or why control logic belongs in the controller while the supervisory layer stays out of the safety path, teaches you far more than a lecture does.

The other real benefit has been visibility. Building publicly on a platform with an active community led to Inductive Automation featuring the project, and to conversations with practising control engineers and integrators that I wouldn't otherwise have had access to as a first-year student.

What do you like best about the product?

One of the most amazing things about Ignition is its design capability and how easy it is to learn. I really like how the built-in components are put together, and how easily those components can be modified with simple CSS classes. On top of that, Ignition is very intuitive, especially when it comes to making those “hard,” stubborn connections to devices, servers, and/or API endpoints. I also appreciate the ability to easily build your own Python/Jython functions and libraries. Overall, Ignition is the most capable, reliable, scalable, and intuitive SCADA platform I have come across.

What do you dislike about the product?

At first it was the lack of version control, now Ignition has version control but the UI changed a lot and quite honestly i was already used to the previous one that i had a sweet spot for it. Secondly, I wish ignition had the capability to build your own components, and be able to modify components more easily

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main issue ignition solves for me and in general is being able to act as a hub for all connections and build your single source of truth in it.

What do you like best about the product?

From our experience at 2Gi Iberia, I would especially highlight the scalability of Ignition, favored by its unlimited licensing model.

Added to this is Inductive Automation's commitment to the continuous improvement of the platform through new versions and functionalities. This is a fundamental aspect, as it provides the confidence of working with a technology that is future-ready, constantly evolving, and supported by a very active community.

What do you dislike about the product?

The flexibility of Ignition is one of its greatest strengths, but it can also pose an initial challenge. By offering so many possibilities, it is essential to define a good architecture, establish development standards, and apply good practices from the start. Otherwise, projects can become difficult to maintain as they grow in size and complexity.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Ignition allows us to centralize, normalize, and contextualize industrial data, becoming a key component for implementing Unified Namespace (UNS) architectures.

Thanks to a common information model, data no longer remains isolated in machines, lines, or applications and becomes available, in real-time and with the appropriate context, for any authorized system.

On this architecture, we can develop all kinds of solutions. The data is generated only once, contextualized, and reused throughout the organization, which promotes scalability, reduces the complexity of integrations, and accelerates the implementation of new use cases.

What do you like best about the product?

Flexibility to build what I want, how I want.

What do you dislike about the product?

The Reporting Module is a bit outdated, especially when comparing it visually to what Perspective UI now brings to the table with stylesheets

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Future scalability and for a very reasonable price you get a premium solution