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Databases · head to head

Canary Labs vs FaunaDB

Canary Labs logo

Canary Labs

Databases

Industrial process historian with published per-tag pricing and no client licence fees

From
$3000/year
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
FaunaDB logo

FaunaDB

Databases

Document-relational database whose hosted service closed in 2025 and whose core is now unmaintained Apache 2.0 code.

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only FaunaDB 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.; FaunaDB the hosted service was wound down in 2025, so there is no managed Fauna to buy; every remaining user either operates a JVM cluster themselves or migrates, and both are projects rather than tasks.
  • They diverge on capability: Canary Labs covers Loss-less compression, FaunaDB covers Document-relational model.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Canary Labs and FaunaDB actually diverge.

Attributes where Canary Labs and FaunaDB differ
AttributeCanary LabsFaunaDB
Starting price$3000/yearFree
Pricing modelPer tag band per yearfreemium
Free tierNoYes
PlatformsWindows, WebWeb
FoundedUnknown2012

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 FaunaDB

  • Document-relational model
  • FQL v10
  • Distributed ACID transactions
  • HTTPS access
  • User-defined functions
  • Attribute-based access control
  • Document history
  • Event streaming

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 FaunaDB
  • A water utility replacing SCADA-embedded logging with a historian that survives the next SCADA replacementnot FaunaDB
  • An Ignition site that wants long-term storage and trending without paying per-client for dashboardsnot FaunaDB
  • A plant with regulatory data-retention obligations where swinging-door compression would not survive an auditnot FaunaDB

FaunaDB

  • Keeping an existing Fauna-backed application alive on self-hosted infrastructure while a migration is planned and fundednot Canary Labs
  • Extracting historical data from a Fauna dataset that can no longer be reached through the hosted APInot Canary Labs
  • Studying a production implementation of deterministic distributed transactions, since the full server source is now readable under Apache 2.0not Canary Labs
  • Forking the engine deliberately, where an organisation has JVM and distributed-systems staff and wants a document-relational store it fully controlsnot 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.

FaunaDB

  • The hosted service was wound down in 2025, so there is no managed Fauna to buy; every remaining user either operates a JVM cluster themselves or migrates, and both are projects rather than tasks.
  • The open-sourced repository has had no substantive activity since May 2025 and the drivers were frozen alongside it, so you inherit responsibility for security patches in a Scala distributed database that almost nobody else is running.
  • FQL has no wire or dialect compatibility with anything else, so migrating off is a rewrite of every query, index and access rule in the application rather than a data export.
  • No BI tool, ORM or CDC connector speaks FQL, so reporting and analytics always required exporting the data first, and that export tooling is now also unmaintained.
  • The community was small before the shutdown and has dispersed since, so operational answers, tuning advice and people who have run a Fauna cluster in anger are all scarce when something breaks.

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

FaunaDB

Free
  • FreeFree
    • 100K read ops
    • 50K write ops
    • 1GB storage
  • Pro$25/month
    • Pay per use
    • Priority support
    • Advanced features

Which should you pick?

Choose Canary Labs if

  • You need loss-less compression.
  • You work on Windows, Web.
  • You also want unlimited clients.
Canary Labs review

Choose FaunaDB if

  • You need document-relational model.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want fql v10.
FaunaDB review

Questions people ask

Is Canary Labs or FaunaDB better?
Neither clearly leads. Canary Labs starts at $3000/year and FaunaDB at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Canary Labs or FaunaDB?
FaunaDB has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at $3000/year for Canary Labs and Free for FaunaDB.
Does Canary Labs or FaunaDB run on more platforms?
Canary Labs runs on Windows, Web. FaunaDB runs on Web.
Can I use FaunaDB for free?
Yes. FaunaDB 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 FaunaDB is typically brought in for.
What can Canary Labs do that FaunaDB cannot?
Canary Labs covers Loss-less compression, Unlimited clients, Store and forward, Views service. FaunaDB covers Document-relational model, FQL v10, Distributed ACID transactions, HTTPS access.

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.

FaunaDB: Can I still sign up for Fauna as a service?

No. Fauna Inc. wound down the hosted service in 2025 and the company website is no longer serving. The only way to run Fauna now is to build and operate the open-sourced server yourself.

Canary Labs: Are client licences extra?

No. Unlimited Axiom browser clients and unlimited Excel clients are included on every tier.

FaunaDB: What licence is the open-sourced code under?

Apache 2.0, with the copyright held by a FaunaDB Foundation. That is a permissive OSI licence with no competing-use clause, so you may run it, modify it and even offer it as a service.

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.

FaunaDB: Is the open source version the same software that ran the cloud?

It is the core database engine. The control plane, billing, dashboard and multi-tenant operational tooling that made it a service are not part of the release, so you are running the engine, not the product.

Canary Labs: Does it use lossy compression?

No. Canary stores every collected value rather than approximating the trend, which matters for regulated data retention.

FaunaDB: What should I migrate to?

There is no drop-in target. Teams that valued the document model with relationships usually land on Postgres with JSONB, and teams that valued the serverless HTTP access pattern usually land on DynamoDB or a managed Postgres with an HTTP driver. Either way the query layer is rewritten.

FaunaDB: How hard is it to self-host?

It builds as a fat JAR and runs as a multi-node JVM cluster. There is an OPERATING.md, but no supported packaging, no operator, no upstream releases and no support contract, so budget for a distributed-systems engineer, not a container.

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