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Proficy HMI/SCADA – CIMPLICITY against Citect

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I need to do a comparision between Proficy HMI/SCADA – CIMPLICITY and Citect for a client. Up until now we have 2 types of SCADA for this client; low end which is Omron CX-Supervisor and high end which is Citect. The client agrees getting trained and developing a new project in Cimplicity will not cover the reduced costs of a license against Citect but still he wants me to find out the difference. A quick look at the brochure of Cimplicity shows is has about the same features as Citect globally. Can anyone tell me how the licensing with Cimplicity is done ? Per I/O count, server license, client license, per driver, etc ? It will probably be a single server installation max 5000 physical I/O using Omron FINS driver and Modbus TCP driver. Anyone who can acually compare these two based on experience ?

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ive used a lot citect and only once cimplicity. cimplicity use a license software key (as siemens). last time ive used a 35000tags license but i dont remember the price. on my experience i prefer to work with citect, maybe because ive used it often.

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I've often heard it said that a users favorite PLC is the one that they're most used to/familiar with. The same could be said about similar HMI packages.

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Cimplicity now (as of version 7) uses hardware keys. They were using software keys up to version 6. I believe they can offer either but prefer the hardware ones at this point. It's a little USB dongle. They charge you per server license. Server licenses are based on I/O count with some scalability...as you get to larger I/O counts, the pricing increments get a lot smaller. Still, licenses can be >$10K per server. For the situation you describe, it is unlikely you'll be looking at more than one server (depending on features). It comes with OPC (server & client) built in as well as drivers for everything GE makes. For everybody else, you're going to pay $500-$1K per driver if you want a native driver. They are discouraging these anyways now and would rather go the OPC route. If I didn't have such a huge legacy project, I'd suggest going for the OPC stuff. There are certain other features that are broken out separately. If you want online hot server redundancy (seamless failover on the servers), you pay for 2 server licenses plus a couple thousand for the special redundancy package. This system is very, very nice and works as well as Citect. Optional modules are an email/pager module (I wrote my own), originally VBA (now free and integrated into the base system), a tracker (tracks pieces of product as they flow through your production line for statistics...very good but they push the much more expensive Proficy Portal + Plant Applications version now...higher revenue), a batching/recipe system (geared toward batch plants), and a marquee driver if you want to run marquees directly. It defaults to logging to SQL Server. This is also used by the clients for trending purposes. I'm not sure how well it supports non-SQL Server databases. It comes bundled with SQL Server Express. If you want better (faster) trending, it is integrated with iHistorian which costs between free (25 point limit) and a few thousand more depending on how many points you want to log. By way of comparison, I have about 2500 points and I'm still only using SQL Server. You can creatively get around the limitations if you aren't too heavily dependent on trending. If you do decide you want full SQL Server, I'd recommend putting it on a separate server and buying it from GE...GE sells it for $100 off the already price gouging Microsoft pricing. At the client end, there are three options. You can buy "standalone" client licenses @ $1650 each. For $100 more, you can buy a web license. For $200 more, you can buy terminal server licenses. Note that the terminal server requires a "server" license too (a 75 point minimum license). Also note that the web version has a few limitations. The primary problematic one is that OLE objects are poorly supported. Other than that, I've had times where operators have accidentally brought up the Webview version and didn't realize why certain things aren't working quite right. The other gotcha is support. To get free upgrades, call GE for support, etc., you get one year free. After that, you pay 20% of the price for the base server modules that you bought and 20% of the price for the standalone clients. As to the future outlook, Cimplicity 7 is the last major version that is going to be released. I don't remember version numbers but the last version of iFix is similarly frozen. GE has stated that they are in the process of working on a new version which will be called "Proficy HMI" which will replace both iFix and Cimplicity. From talking to various GE people that would know, it appears that the iFix "client" or HMI side of things is probably going to be scrapped because the Cimplicity HMI has higher performance. I've also heard/seen rumors that they are going to be going closer to a Real Time Information Portal type of platform, although they have clearly made noise about staking out territory in dotNET instead of a Java-based system. They are also clearly interested in moving the alarm system and point database into an OPC UA model. This was the reason for the recent bundling of OPC Server into Cimplicity 7 instead of leaving it as a separate optional model...the new version will be entirely OPC based for communication. iHistorian is also clearly going to be the data logger of choice, possibly with an iHistorian "lite" option. VBA is of course the enigma that it is for everyone else. Microsoft is seriously pushing dotNET and Visual Studio. The burning issue here is that Microsoft themselves haven't upgraded Microsoft Office to dotNET. Until they do, VBA is here to stay since dropping VBA means dropping support for Microsoft Office. Even though this is usually a minor issue in the controls world, it is still an issue. I feel that once Microsoft Office supports dotNET, VBA will probably be dropped, too. Speaking from the point of view of the maintainer for a large Cimplicity installation, I'd suggest you seriously consider Citect, Inductive Automation, and perhaps InteractX from CTC-Parker. Even though the last two don't carry the "low end" price tag of CX-Supervisor, at least Inductive Automation's product is on par with Cimplicity and actually excels in certain areas. The thing that has always been very well done and has been the shining feature of the system in Cimplicity is database support. Inductive Automation however blows them away in this respect. InteractX seems to have a slight edge in terms of graphics platform and does logging/trending pretty well, although not as well as I'd like.

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