Monitor your industrial plant from any browser — Modbus TCP/RTU, MQTT, OPC UA, real-time dashboards and alarm management — without AVEVA's license complexity, integrator dependency, or six-figure project costs.
60-day free trial · All features included · No credit card required
AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) has been a dominant force in industrial SCADA for decades. But the same features that made it powerful in the 2000s are now friction points for modern engineering teams deploying new monitoring projects.
Tag-based and I/O point licensing. AVEVA System Platform and InTouch price by tag count — the number of data points you want to monitor. A 5,000-tag license easily costs $15,000–$40,000 before professional services. Every time your project grows, you go back to the distributor for more tags. There is no fixed, predictable monthly cost.
Mandatory integrator engagement. AVEVA projects are typically delivered through a network of certified system integrators. Getting a quote means engaging a VAR or integrator; deploying the system means paying integrator day-rates on top of the license cost. Engineers who want to self-serve and move quickly find this model frustrating and slow.
Windows server infrastructure requirement. AVEVA System Platform runs on dedicated Windows servers — often multiple servers for redundancy. This means server procurement, Windows licensing, IT maintenance, and a specialized AVEVA administrator. For cloud-first organizations or lean OT teams, this infrastructure overhead is a significant burden.
Steep learning curve for ArchestrA and System Platform. AVEVA's ArchestrA object model, Galaxy architecture, and Application Server concepts are powerful but require significant training and experience to configure correctly. Engineers who want to go from zero to live data in a day find the complexity disproportionate to many use cases.
Annual maintenance contracts are expensive. AVEVA's annual software maintenance agreements typically run 18–22% of the initial license value per year. On a $30,000 initial license, that is $5,400–$6,600 per year just to keep the software on current support — regardless of whether you need new features.
How the two platforms compare across the criteria that matter most for new deployments
| Feature | SCADA Cloud | AVEVA |
|---|---|---|
| Browser-based (no install required) | ✓ Yes | ✗ InTouch client install |
| Server required | No — fully cloud-hosted | Yes — Windows server + OMI |
| License model | Simple monthly plan | Tag-count + named user licenses |
| Setup time | Minutes | Days to weeks |
| Integrator required | No — self-service | Typically yes |
| Free trial | 60 days — all features | Limited evaluation available |
| Modbus TCP | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Via DAServer |
| Modbus RTU | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Via DAServer |
| MQTT | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Via connector |
| OPC UA | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Built-in |
| Annual maintenance fee | Included in plan | 18–22% of license/year |
| Starting cost | Free trial, then affordable monthly | $10,000–$30,000+ software only |
Enter the IP and port for Modbus TCP devices, configure a serial gateway for RTU, point to an MQTT broker, or connect an OPC UA server. No DAServer, no ArchestrA Galaxy, no Windows server to configure.
Map Modbus registers, MQTT topics, or OPC UA nodes to named tags. Set engineering units, scaling, and deadband — all from the browser in minutes, without ArchestrA object hierarchies.
Add gauges, trend charts, alarm tables, and status widgets to a live dashboard canvas. Share the URL with your team — they open it in any browser, with no InTouch client installation needed.
A 50–500 tag plant does not need AVEVA's tag-licensed Galaxy architecture. SCADA Cloud delivers production-grade monitoring at a monthly cost that scales with actual project size — not a tag-count estimate made at procurement.
Organizations moving to cloud-managed infrastructure can't justify a dedicated Windows SCADA server for every site. SCADA Cloud hosts everything — no server at each plant, no VPN required for remote access, no OS patching schedule.
When a customer needs a live monitoring dashboard before next week's site visit, AVEVA's procurement and installation timeline is impossible to meet. SCADA Cloud can be live with real device data in under an hour from sign-up.
Embed cloud-based remote monitoring into your machine offering without bundling an AVEVA license with every unit. Customers see live machine data from any browser; you manage the fleet from one SCADA Cloud account without per-unit license overhead.
AVEVA SCADA pricing is structured around tag counts, I/O points, and named user licenses. A basic System Platform installation commonly starts at $10,000–$30,000 just for the software, before engineering hours, server hardware, annual maintenance contracts, and mandatory training. Enterprise deployments with thousands of I/O points can reach six figures. Pricing requires going through a distributor or certified integrator, which adds further friction and cost.
For the majority of new monitoring projects — especially those involving Modbus, MQTT, or OPC UA devices — yes. SCADA Cloud delivers real-time dashboards, alarm management, historical trending, and multi-site visibility without the server infrastructure, tag-based licensing, or integrator dependency that AVEVA requires. The 60-day free trial lets you connect real devices and validate the platform before committing.
SCADA Cloud natively supports Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU (via serial gateway), MQTT, and OPC UA — the four protocols covering the vast majority of modern industrial field devices. AVEVA supports a broader set of legacy protocols through its DAServer architecture, but for projects built on modern protocols, SCADA Cloud provides equivalent connectivity at a fraction of the cost.
With SCADA Cloud, most engineers have live data on a dashboard within 15–30 minutes of signing up at scada.modbussimulator.com/register. There is no server to provision, no software to install on workstations, and no integrator engagement required. AVEVA deployments typically involve weeks of project scoping, hardware procurement, server setup, DAServer configuration, and InTouch or System Platform installation — before a single tag goes live.
60-day free trial. All features included. No credit card, no server, no integrator required.
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