Intouch (Wonderware) vs. Factory Talk SE

Just want to know others people major pro and cons of both Intouch and Factory Talk..?

I can not speak on InTouch. But as far as FT, let me say one thing before I get into it. I am a programmer, and not a graphically inclined one! So based off of functional use i have to say FT makes it very easy to tie things together. But I do have two negatives to share.

1st- if you are working on a major project PUT FACTORYTALK ON A VIRTUAL MACHINE OR ISLAND IT FROM THE INTERNET. I hope that was loud enough to hear because it always seems to happen during major projects or near due dates that windows decides to throw and update or patch and FT is not resilient to changes on the computer. See my recent post about a FT project I recently had to go to hell and back to recover.

2nd and this one could be because I spend more of my time in rs/studio and less in FT studio but aligning and centering images, text, shapes, or really anything is a colossal paint in the ——. And when I wrote this if anyone has another way of handling this let me know. But in order to get things centered you have to draw lines and make them half the size of the total size of the screen. I will post a photo of a (ugly) hmi but not that for everything there I had to use lines and calculations to find middle points then a lot of copy and paste to get it pretty.

Overall I’ll take the designing flaws for the functionality of the program. It is a very powerful tool! (And if anyone has tips for aligning let me know because although I don’t have to worry about hmi displays too much, I would like them to look a bit better)

Disregard the big black box at the top, I wanted to protect the clients information. But see that everyone of those boxes are their own item, making them all align properly required finding the central point in different areas with division and subtraction haha. Again if anyone has tips for me on that it would be greatly appreciated

So that’s how you Siemens haters spell “maintenance”. Haha

Ih8Siemens said:

Overall I’ll take the designing flaws for the functionality of the program. It is a very powerful tool! (And if anyone has tips for aligning let me know because although I don’t have to worry about hmi displays too much, I would like them to look a bit better)

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The alignment tools in FTView Studio are fairly good. Yes, there are some with flashy features (Beijer) but you need to know what your options are first.


Most HMI designers will have similar tools, but the most important alignment tools in FTView Studio:
(1) the actual alignment tools: left/right edge align, top/bottom, middle horz/vert

(2) Group and ungroup (ctrl-G and ctrl-U)

(3) Pixel movement: select object, hold down shift, use the arrow keys

(4) Ctrl select-click: to add/remove items to a selection

(5) Object explorer and property panel; for exact size and XY changes

Use the (un)group as a temporary thing to help with alignment; not as a permanent state that you save the screen into.

Is that better than InTouch? ymmv