Canary Labs

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

As of 1 September 2026, Canary Labs starts at $3000/year. A historian that publishes its price list, which almost none of its competitors do: 8,730 USD perpetual for 3,500 tags, or 3,000 USD a year on subscription, with unlimited clients included. Softwr lists it under Databases. Canary Labs is made by Canary Labs, Inc., available on Windows, Web.

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Overview

What Canary Labs does

Canary is a time-series historian for industrial process data. It collects from OPC UA, OPC DA, MQTT with Sparkplug B, SQL and REST, stores it in a proprietary loss-less compressed format, and exposes it through the Axiom browser client, an Excel add-in, ODBC and a REST API. It is a historian rather than a general time-series database: it understands tag quality codes, deadbanding and store-and-forward from edge collectors. The distinguishing fact is transparent pricing with unlimited clients. A 3,500 tag on-premise system is 8,730 USD perpetual, made up of a 7,400 USD licence and 1,330 USD of first-year CustomerCare, or 3,000 USD a year as a subscription; CustomerCare renews at 18 percent of licence cost annually. Both perpetual and subscription include unlimited Axiom browser clients and unlimited Excel clients, which is where the comparison against PI System and Ignition gets interesting, because client and connector licensing is usually where historian bills grow. Canary itself publishes a pricing comparison against PI and Ignition, which tells you what argument it expects to win on. Private cloud hosting is a separate ladder starting around 12,320 USD a year at 3,500 tags with a 1,500 USD one-time setup fee per system, and the ODBC connector is 2,500 USD one-time or 1,000 USD annually. Who buys it: mid-size manufacturers, water utilities, pharmaceutical sites and oil and gas operators who need a real historian but cannot justify a PI System enterprise agreement. The trade-off is scale and ecosystem: Canary is a small company with a proprietary store, a smaller partner network, and nothing like PI Systems reach into enterprise analytics tooling.

What people use it 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

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about 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.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Canary Labs

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Canary Labsvs
AVEVA PI System
AVEVA PI System: Pick PI System if you need the enterprise ecosystem, asset framework and analytics tooling built around it.
Canary Labsvs
InfluxDB
InfluxDB: Pick InfluxDB if your data is not really industrial and you would rather have an open time-series database.
Canary Labsvs
Ignition
Ignition: Pick Ignition if you want the historian bundled with SCADA and HMI on the same server licence.

Pricing

What Canary Labs costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Subscription, 3,500 tags

$3,000 /yr

Unlimited Axiom clients
Unlimited Excel clients
Support and upgrades included
Annual billing, quarterly on request

Perpetual, 3,500 tags

$8,730 /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
Pays back against subscription after roughly three years

Private cloud, 3,500 tags

$12,320 /yr

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

On request

Unlimited tags
Negotiated licensing terms
Quoted pricing

Capabilities

Features

Loss-less compression
Stores every collected value rather than swinging-door approximations, so audit and regulatory queries return the original data
Unlimited clients
Axiom browser dashboards and the Excel add-in are unlimited on every licence tier
Store and forward
Edge collectors buffer locally and backfill when the link to the historian returns
Views service
A read layer that aggregates multiple historian instances into one query surface
Sparkplug B
Native MQTT Sparkplug collection alongside OPC UA and OPC DA
Calculation engine
Derived tags computed and stored alongside collected tags
Axiom
Browser trending and dashboard client with no per-seat charge
ODBC and REST
SQL and HTTP access for reporting tools, licensed separately for ODBC

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

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.

Are client licences extra?

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

Is perpetual cheaper than subscription?

Canary states perpetual pays off after roughly three years, and after that you still pay 18 percent CustomerCare annually.

Does it use lossy compression?

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

Keep looking

Where to go from Canary Labs

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Canary Labs, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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