we have used Wonderware intouch with and without archestra and wonderware system platform, the wonderware historian, Citect, iFix, Factory Talk SE (network distributed), Factory Talk ME, Factory Talk historian (Osisoft Pi), and vijeo designer with magelis panels.
All of these packages drive me crazy in different ways, and I wasn't on the wonderware system platform project so I don't have first hand experience with it, except when I had to go fill in for a weekend during commissioning and couldn't figure out how to add a tag.
Generally we try and work with whatever in house know how the customer might have in the region so if they already have 8 plants with citect we will use citect.
Both citect and Factory talk worked extremely well for us with multiple display clients.
The advantage of having factory talk read the tag database out of the PLC more or less outweighed all of the other nuisances. Too bad schneider doesn't have a tag picker in their HMIs that can read the tags out of the PLC. I guess that is what happens when your product is made up of dozens of acquisitions instead of designed to work together; bolt on integrations everywhere. The factory talk alarm system was great too. The factory talk trend tool is underwhelming. How can it be so hard to export the data that makes a trend to an excel or CSV file? They must make it so difficult to try and up-sell some other product.
The citect trend tool (process analyst) is the most useable I have worked with so far. the citect alarm screen prior to version 7.5 is an embarassment. I only briefly played with a version 7.5 trend screen demo but I feel that it is layers of hacks on top of their existing infrastructure. Citect is stuck in the 90s...but at least it works as advertised, is solid and reliable, even if it is a bit kludgy.
Generally I believe wonderware is more modern that citect, but it costs us significantly more due to the support contract to get the development software, and the licenses are more expensive too.
Going forward we are going to try ignition for a small project and then assuming that goes well hopefully will be using it wherever we have the freedom to choose for the client.
We dropped our wonderware and allen bradley support contracts. Still have schneider support because we use Unity heavily. Probably will default to citect in the future (or maybe wonderware will be included in schnieder support) if the ignition experiment doesn't work for us.
For touchscreen panels I want to switch to Red Lion so we don't have to **** around with licenses for Vijeo designer. My only gripe with the Magelis panels / vijeo designer is that to make a plot I have to make it the size I want on the screen, set the font size and number of decimals for the y axis, then look up the number of horizontal pixels on the plot area, and then set the datalogging period to correspond with the desired x axis time scale. Took a while to figure out that process!!
edit:
We are starting to include a
mangoES device (
http://infiniteautomation.com/index.php/hardware) in our control panels for the sole purpose of e-mailing automatically generated plots to the operator. They can also do cloud metrics monitoring style web based dashboards using google's Angular javascript framework and the AmCharts plotting library. A great way to marry old school modbus data collection and cutting edge client environment to get plots on to people's iPhones etc.
