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Databases · head to head

Canary Labs vs Timeplus

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
Timeplus logo

Timeplus

Databases

Streaming SQL engine built on ClickHouse internals, shipping as one small binary

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Timeplus 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.; Timeplus proton, the free version, is single-node by design, so any requirement for high availability or horizontal scale forces the commercial licence; the open source edition is a trial in practical terms.
  • They diverge on capability: Canary Labs covers Loss-less compression, Timeplus covers Streaming SQL.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.

Where they differ

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

Attributes where Canary Labs and Timeplus differ
AttributeCanary LabsTimeplus
Starting price$3000/yearFree
Pricing modelPer tag band per yearPer month for cloud, quoted for self-hosted
Free tierNoYes
PlatformsWindows, WebLinux, macOS, Docker, Kubernetes, Web

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 Timeplus

  • Streaming SQL
  • Unified streaming and historical
  • ClickHouse-based engine
  • Single binary deployment
  • External streams
  • Materialised views

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

Timeplus

  • Real-time alerting on Kafka topics where standing up a Flink cluster is more work than the use case justifiesnot Canary Labs
  • Fraud or anomaly detection that must join a live event stream against recent history in one querynot Canary Labs
  • Streaming ETL from Kafka or MySQL change data capture into ClickHouse without writing Javanot Canary Labs
  • A small data team that needs continuous aggregation but has no platform engineers to operate JVM infrastructurenot 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.

Timeplus

  • Proton, the free version, is single-node by design, so any requirement for high availability or horizontal scale forces the commercial licence; the open source edition is a trial in practical terms.
  • It is a young project against Apache Flink’s decade of production history, so the hiring pool, the connector library and the body of known failure modes are all much smaller.
  • Inheriting ClickHouse internals also inherits ClickHouse constraints: memory-hungry queries, awkward updates and a SQL dialect that is not portable to other engines.
  • Exactly-once semantics and state recovery guarantees are less battle-tested than Flink checkpointing, which matters if the pipeline moves money.
  • Cloud pricing is by provisioned instance size rather than usage, so a bursty workload pays for peak capacity around the clock or has to be resized by hand.

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

Timeplus

Free
  • Timeplus ProtonFree
    • Apache 2.0 licence
    • Single node only
    • Full streaming SQL engine
  • Timeplus Cloud$199/month
    • One to thirty-two CPUs
    • 4 GB to 128 GB memory
    • From 250 GB SSD storage
  • Self-hosted or BYOC$undefined/year
    • Multi-node clustering
    • Kubernetes or bare metal
    • Customisable compute and storage

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 Timeplus if

  • You need streaming sql.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Linux, macOS, Docker, Kubernetes, Web.
  • You also want unified streaming and historical.
Timeplus review

Questions people ask

Is Canary Labs or Timeplus better?
Neither clearly leads. Canary Labs starts at $3000/year and Timeplus at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Canary Labs or Timeplus?
Timeplus has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at $3000/year for Canary Labs and Free for Timeplus.
Does Canary Labs or Timeplus run on more platforms?
Canary Labs runs on Windows, Web. Timeplus runs on Linux, macOS, Docker, Kubernetes, Web.
Can I use Timeplus for free?
Yes. Timeplus 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 Timeplus is typically brought in for.
What can Canary Labs do that Timeplus cannot?
Canary Labs covers Loss-less compression, Unlimited clients, Store and forward, Views service. Timeplus covers Streaming SQL, Unified streaming and historical, ClickHouse-based engine, Single binary deployment.

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.

Timeplus: Is Timeplus open source?

The core engine, Timeplus Proton, is Apache 2.0. Timeplus Enterprise and Cloud are commercial.

Canary Labs: Are client licences extra?

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

Timeplus: What is the difference from Flink?

Timeplus is one binary with SQL as the only interface; Flink is a JVM cluster with a Java and SQL API and far more operational surface.

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.

Timeplus: Can Proton run in production?

It can, but it is single-node only, so there is no high availability without the commercial edition.

Canary Labs: Does it use lossy compression?

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

Timeplus: How much is the cloud?

From 199 US dollars a month, sized by CPU and memory, with a fourteen day trial.

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