Databases · head to head
Canary Labs vs DynamoDB
Canary Labs
Databases
Industrial process historian with published per-tag pricing and no client licence fees
- From
- $3000/year
- Rated
- -
DynamoDB
Databases
AWS-only managed key-value and document database with fixed per-partition throughput limits and no ad hoc queries.
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Only DynamoDB has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
- Each has a real cost: Canary Labs pricing steps by tag band rather than actual tags, so a site sitting just above a threshold pays the next band in full; growth from 3,400 to 3,600 tags is a licence purchase, not a rounding error.; DynamoDB access patterns must be designed into the key schema before launch; a query nobody anticipated needs a new global secondary index, which is a full extra copy of the projected attributes billed as storage and as writes, or an offline migration.
- They diverge on capability: Canary Labs covers Loss-less compression, DynamoDB covers Managed and serverless.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Canary Labs and DynamoDB actually diverge.
| Attribute | Canary Labs | DynamoDB |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $3000/year | Free |
| Pricing model | Per tag band per year | usage-based |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Platforms | Windows, Web | AWS |
| Founded | Unknown | 2006 |
Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated), category (Databases).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Canary Labs
- Loss-less compression
- Unlimited clients
- Store and forward
- Views service
- Sparkplug B
- Calculation engine
- Axiom
- ODBC and REST
Only in DynamoDB
- Managed and serverless
- Predictable latency
- On-demand or provisioned capacity
- Global secondary indexes
- Transactions
- DynamoDB Streams
- Global tables
- Point-in-time recovery
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Canary Labs
- A manufacturer that needs a compliant historian but cannot justify a PI System enterprise agreementnot DynamoDB
- A water utility replacing SCADA-embedded logging with a historian that survives the next SCADA replacementnot DynamoDB
- An Ignition site that wants long-term storage and trending without paying per-client for dashboardsnot DynamoDB
- A plant with regulatory data-retention obligations where swinging-door compression would not survive an auditnot DynamoDB
DynamoDB
- High-volume keyed workloads such as sessions, shopping carts, device state or user profiles where the access pattern is fixed and knownnot Canary Labs
- Traffic that spikes unpredictably, where on-demand capacity absorbs a burst without a capacity-planning exercisenot Canary Labs
- Serverless applications on Lambda, where an HTTP-based datastore avoids the connection pooling problem relational databases havenot Canary Labs
- Event or telemetry ingestion where writes vastly outnumber reads and each record is retrieved by a known identifiernot Canary Labs
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Canary Labs
- Pricing steps by tag band rather than actual tags, so a site sitting just above a threshold pays the next band in full; growth from 3,400 to 3,600 tags is a licence purchase, not a rounding error.
- CustomerCare at 18 percent of licence cost is effectively mandatory on perpetual licences because lapsing it removes upgrades, so the perpetual option is not really a one-time cost.
- The storage format is proprietary; getting data out at volume means the ODBC connector, an additional 2,500 USD one-time or 1,000 USD a year, or writing against the REST API.
- Canary is a small vendor with a limited partner network outside North America, so support coverage and integrator availability in Europe and Asia are thinner than for AVEVA or Ignition.
- It is a Windows-only server product with no Linux or container deployment, which complicates placing collectors in modern edge estates.
DynamoDB
- Access patterns must be designed into the key schema before launch; a query nobody anticipated needs a new global secondary index, which is a full extra copy of the projected attributes billed as storage and as writes, or an offline migration.
- Global secondary indexes are eventually consistent and cannot be read strongly, so a read-after-write against an index can legitimately miss the item that was just written, and application code must be written to tolerate that.
- Per-partition throughput is capped at roughly 3,000 read and 1,000 write units, so a hot key throttles even when the table has spare capacity overall, and the only real fix is changing the key design to spread the load.
- Items are limited to 400 KB and query results paginate at 1 MB, so large or list-shaped data has to be split, offloaded to S3 with a pointer, or read through pagination loops that complicate every consumer.
- It runs only on AWS and the API is proprietary rather than a standard, so moving the data layer means rewriting it; ScyllaDB's Alternator is the only meaningfully compatible target and it brings a much smaller ecosystem.
Pricing, plan by plan
Canary Labs
$3000/year- Subscription, 3,500 tags$3000/year
- Unlimited Axiom clients
- Unlimited Excel clients
- Support and upgrades included
- Perpetual, 3,500 tags$8730/one-time
- 7,400 USD licence plus 1,330 USD first-year CustomerCare
- CustomerCare renews at 18 percent of licence cost per year
- Unlimited clients
- Private cloud, 3,500 tags$12320/year
- Hosted by Canary
- 1,500 USD one-time setup fee per system
- Scales to around 58,684 USD per year at 60,000 tags
- Enterprise unlimited$undefined/year
- Unlimited tags
- Negotiated licensing terms
- Quoted pricing
DynamoDB
Free- On-Demand Capacity$null/usage-based
- Pay-per-request pricing with automatic scaling
- Read: 0.5 RRU per 4 KB (eventually consistent), 1 RRU per 4 KB (strongly consistent), 2 RRU per 4 KB (transactional)
- Write: 1 WRU per 1 KB
- Provisioned Capacity$null/hourly
- Fixed hourly charges based on reserved capacity
- RCU rate: $0.00013 per hour (Standard)
- WCU rate: $0.00065 per hour (Standard)
- Standard Table Class Storage$0.25/per GB/month
- $0.25 per GB/month after free tier
- First 25 GB free per month (free tier)
- Standard-Infrequent Access Table Class$0.1/per GB/month
- $0.10 per GB/month
Which should you pick?
Choose Canary Labs if
- You need loss-less compression.
- You work on Windows, Web.
- You also want unlimited clients.
Choose DynamoDB if
- You need managed and serverless.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on AWS.
- You also want predictable latency.
Questions people ask
- Is Canary Labs or DynamoDB better?
- Neither clearly leads. Canary Labs starts at $3000/year and DynamoDB at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Canary Labs or DynamoDB?
- DynamoDB has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at $3000/year for Canary Labs and Free for DynamoDB.
- Does Canary Labs or DynamoDB run on more platforms?
- Canary Labs runs on Windows, Web. DynamoDB runs on AWS.
- Can I use DynamoDB for free?
- Yes. DynamoDB has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Canary Labs starts at $3000/year.
- What is Canary Labs best used for?
- Canary Labs is most often used for a manufacturer that needs a compliant historian but cannot justify a pi system enterprise agreement, a water utility replacing scada-embedded logging with a historian that survives the next scada replacement, an ignition site that wants long-term storage and trending without paying per-client for dashboards, a plant with regulatory data-retention obligations where swinging-door compression would not survive an audit. Of those, a manufacturer that needs a compliant historian but cannot justify a pi system enterprise agreement and a water utility replacing scada-embedded logging with a historian that survives the next scada replacement are not what DynamoDB is typically brought in for.
- What can Canary Labs do that DynamoDB cannot?
- Canary Labs covers Loss-less compression, Unlimited clients, Store and forward, Views service. DynamoDB covers Managed and serverless, Predictable latency, On-demand or provisioned capacity, Global secondary indexes.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Canary Labs: What does Canary cost?
8,730 USD for a 3,500 tag perpetual system including first-year CustomerCare, or 3,000 USD a year on subscription.
DynamoDB: On-demand or provisioned capacity?
On-demand suits unpredictable or spiky traffic and removes capacity planning. Provisioned with autoscaling is considerably cheaper for steady high-volume workloads. Tables can be switched between them, though not arbitrarily often.
Canary Labs: Are client licences extra?
No. Unlimited Axiom browser clients and unlimited Excel clients are included on every tier.
DynamoDB: Can I run DynamoDB outside AWS?
No. DynamoDB Local exists for development and testing only. For a production-compatible alternative elsewhere, ScyllaDB's Alternator implements the DynamoDB API, but it is a different system with a different ecosystem.
Canary Labs: Is perpetual cheaper than subscription?
Canary states perpetual pays off after roughly three years, and after that you still pay 18 percent CustomerCare annually.
DynamoDB: Can I run ad hoc queries or analytics?
Not on the table itself. Scans are slow and expensive at scale. The usual pattern is to export to S3 or stream changes out and query them in Athena, Redshift or another analytical engine.
Canary Labs: Does it use lossy compression?
No. Canary stores every collected value rather than approximating the trend, which matters for regulated data retention.
DynamoDB: Is single-table design necessary?
It is the pattern that gets the most from DynamoDB when access patterns are well known, because it lets related items be retrieved in one query. It also makes the model harder to evolve, so many teams reasonably choose multiple simpler tables and accept extra requests.
DynamoDB: What are the real limits I should design around?
400 KB per item, 1 MB per query or scan page, 100 items per transaction, roughly 3,000 read and 1,000 write units per partition, and eventual consistency on global secondary indexes.
Related pages
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