What are the most commonly used PLCs today?

Upstate, midland, or costal?

I sell World wide... https://www.plccable.com/

Not that I am a big player... peanuts as a matter of fact, but I have tried to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks and for the most part AB stuck, Siemens is getting more and more and since TIA Portal about V13 they have been getting more but in SC and North America its still AB's ball park and we are just watching the game play out

Yes with BMW up north its more Siemens and Boeing down south its more AB but in general its still AB overall
 
In large parts of Europe Siemens is the main player, but it is like it's very from industri to industri.

When I ask AB they say they have around 33% of the market in Europe.

But also Omron and Beckhoff is strong in the market

I am a small player, installing around 12 PLC's a year, but I will normally use AB and only deliver a Siemens solution if it's a specific request from the costumer.


But that is just me :)
 
I think it depends on the industry.

As far as brand name, I think Allen Bradley and Siemens are still the top 2 I see.

If you had TIA portal and RSLogix 5000, I'm betting you could find work at 90% of the companies in my area.

RSLogix 500 is still around, but not as common. I still see some Step 7 - but even those customers are starting to convert to TIA portal.

If you are an OEM building smaller machines, you would see a large variety of other options like Automation Direct, EZautomation, Mitsubishi, Allen Bradley Micro800, Siemens Logo, etc.
 
Two of my engineers were in a Brand S training class, where one of their salesmen bragged about how Brand S PLCs and drives were used on a high-profile project in our area.

I am aware that this was not true, because I was the controls engineer on the project.

When a salesman who is trying to convert an OEM tells you "all the others are switching", take it with a grain of salt.
 
anyone ever ask their local AB peoples if they have plans of doing something like this? i could see something like a Panelview 800 with a Micro800 series style processor built into the back of it. would be excellent for smaller projects
It's talked about within A-B a lot, the end result is always the same. MOST A-B users don't want them because if you lose one or the other, you lose both. I have been asked at least once per year in surveys they do on what we want to see, I have said no to this every time for that reason and I have been given feedback that this is the consensus.
 
http://automationprimer.com/2013/10/06/plc-manufacturer-rankings/

2013 article - Older statistics mentioned but still looks relatively accurate.
That ranking is for automation companies, so the listing of ABB as #2 in worldwide must be including DCS systems because ABB is extremely weak in actual PLCs. From a pure PLC/PAC system standpoint worldwide, the stats I have seen are Siemens #1, Rockwell #2, Schneider #3, Omron #4 , with all other brands below those being less than 5% market share.


But this paragraph is something I do believe from that article:
In North America Rockwell/Allen-Bradley had between 60% and 70% of the market share in both OEM and end-user markets. Siemens was a very distant second with 5% of the OEM market and 19% of end users, Schneider (Modicon) took the third spot with 5% of OEMs and 4% of end users. This left about 20% of the market in both the OEM and end-user categories for all other manufacturers combined.
That fits my personal experience.
 
It's talked about within A-B a lot, the end result is always the same. MOST A-B users don't want them because if you lose one or the other, you lose both. I have been asked at least once per year in surveys they do on what we want to see, I have said no to this every time for that reason and I have been given feedback that this is the consensus.


Could you expand on this? In a "normal" setup, if you lose the PLC, the HMI is as good as dead too (apart from price).



I would think that the reason people wouldn't want this setup is that screens are likely to fail before the PLC, but you'd have to replace and upgrade the program for the new processor whenever the HMI died. This, particularly with Rockwell, would have serious price implications.
 
They (not AB) have been making them for years and I hate them, I had a screen go bad and yes had to replace the PLC also and I like the HMI to look clean not have a bunch of wires running to it and 80% of the time the HMI is not near the PLC

I quoted replacing them for one customer but did not get the job, I understand the thought "if you only have a few I/O" but still not a fan, Red Lion also talked about doing not sure if they ever did
 
I'll ping this a month late.

Rockwell is still king in the USA and Commonwealth countries. To be honest, it surprises me every day that this is the case since just judging based on price, performance, capability, MTTF, innovation, interoperability, and lead-time; Rockwell is garbage. However, once you factor in people with experience working with it, it becomes a self fueling firestorm that's hard to escape. No one ever got fired for specifying Rockwell (this isn't true, I have seen it happen, but the sentiment is true-ish).

Siemens is #2 in these regions and probably #1 worldwide. Profinet is the better protocol when compared with Ethernet/IP, but I don't have too much else to say to differentiate them.

Third place is VERY VERY hard to get a handle on because the publicly available market share numbers are all very old, some companies are small fry in PLC but huge in embedded devices in general, some companies are super regional, and some companies are huge in niche industries.

You have to also consider Automation Direct which decided to just go with affordable fixed pricing for lower tier PLC stuff. I'm sure a ton of people that would have formerly contacted a Rockwell distributor for a quote just ordered AD like they would Amazon Prime and were happy as clams that they didn't have to negotiate pricing.

Omron is a big name and people know it and it is super popular in Japan. They make most of their money from medical equipment and making hardware that places like Rockwell private labels. They're certainly in the top 10 in the US, but probably not top 4 when it comes to PLC market share.

B&R was super fast growing and appeared to be dominating Beckhoff in market share, then 3rd party adoption for EtherCAT went like wildfire (even though it is super similar to SERCOS III which was not picked up much by 3rd party devices). EtherCAT put Beckhoff on the map and I would hazard to guess that they are now growing faster than B&R based on name recognition. ABB acquired B&R recently and will likely transition their machine control stuff over to the B&R family because it is objectively better than ABB's offering. I mention B&R and Beckhoff together because they really are so much alike at the 10,000ft level as far as capability and product selection and probably market share (they're definitely rivals). At the detailed level they diverge a lot. For the record, I think B&R is the better solution and is simply saddled with a generic name with an ampersand in it.

Schneider-Electric buys up successful PLC brands and kills them because they make most of their money with electric utility type equipment and Square-D. Some of their PLCs are made by B&R, so do you count that as B&R or SE? Elau was big in the advanced motion PLC space and is probably a 10th their size now that they are SE's PacDrive brand, likely consisting almost entirely of old Elau customers that haven't switched to B&R, Beckhoff, or Keba.

Then you have Bosch-Rexroth, Lenze, Honeywell, Mitsubishi, etc. A bunch of other big old names that are struggling to keep market share against the behemoths of Rockwell and Siemens while staving off the innovative powerhouses of B&R and Beckhoff. Lenze picked up a lot of engineers from both Elau and B&R, so there is a chance we'll see something surprising come from them.

There are also niche industry stuff like Parker, Emmerson, DeltaV, etc that simply don't exist in machine control spaces that I work in, but have big following in pumping, mining, and process.


Ultimately I think AD is 3rd in US market share and I that might be a comfortable lead. B&R and Beckhoff are close at 4th and 5th (at this point, Beckhoff may be the bigger of the two). I'd put Schneider at 6th and Omron at 7th. A lot of people are going to look at the installed base and think there is no f-ing way B&R or Beckhoff are punching above X or Y big old brand. To that point, machine control is a larger market segment than the others and it is growing. Major multinational conglomerates like Coesia and Barry-Wehmiller are standardising their controls platforms on new machine designs on those two and some black box systems you don't think about use them (the majority of inspection systems have B&R panels). If I was going off the machines at PackExpo/PharmaExpo, It looked like 70% Rockwell, 5% AD, 5% Siemens, 5% B&R, and the remaining 10% were everyone else. I saw only 3 Beckhoff machines and only one PacDrive machine (and the HMI was Beckhoff). I know Siemens has more market share, but it must not be in packaging.
 
In recent conversation with a B&R guy, they are starting to branch some sales engineers out from Atlanta to neighboring states. Maybe some more integrators will pick them up.

If they had the presence of the likes of AB in our area, one would be foolish to not give them a shot. If I were building machines and given the choice, it would be B&R. It’s an all-in-one architecture that can be freely expanded without barriers. Much like Beckhoff too if I had to guess.

However, while support is free, the convenience of picking up the phone and calling a guy down the road for some application specific assistance is not here for B&R.
Still, AB is an hour and a half from their door to ours.
 
What drives my decision is availability. As a maintenance manager, I have always attempted to keep an honest amount of spares. However, the machines I have that have B&R from the OEM don't have the support for the parts, and there is not one local rep. for any of the others besides AB.
Just my two cents.
 
However, once you factor in people with experience working with it, it becomes a self fueling firestorm that's hard to escape. No one ever got fired for specifying Rockwell (this isn't true, I have seen it happen, but the sentiment is true-ish).

I don't have examples to the contrary, but would say that this is normal human behaviour. We're still tribal deep down and allegiance to a brand (any brand) is based on that and not always logic.
 

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