VTScada

SCADA software for water, wastewater and remote telemetry with a published price list

As of 1 September 2026, VTScada starts at $3395/one-time. One of the very few industrial SCADA vendors that publishes its full price list. Softwr lists it under Utilities. VTScada is made by Trihedral Engineering Limited, available on Windows.

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Overview

What VTScada does

VTScada is SCADA software from Trihedral Engineering, aimed squarely at water and wastewater utilities, oil and gas gathering, and other geographically distributed telemetry systems. It bundles what other vendors sell separately: historian, alarm notification with dial-out and SMS, reporting, trending, security, version control and the full driver set including DNP3, Modbus, Motorola ACE and radio diagnostics all ship inside the base licence. The distinguishing fact is price transparency. Trihedral publishes a downloadable US price list with exact figures by I/O tag band, which almost nobody else in industrial SCADA does. A build-your-own base licence up to 1,000 I/O tags is 3,395 USD; up to 5,000 tags is 4,295 USD; up to 50,000 tags is 7,195 USD. Adding development is a further 3,000 to 7,200 USD depending on band, alarm notification 1,795 to 4,195 USD, and thin clients from 2,895 USD for one to 59,395 USD for unlimited at 50,000 tags. The bundled options are cheaper: a discounted single-server system with development, notification and two thin clients is 14,795 USD at 1,000 tags and 32,495 USD at 50,000. Annual SupportPlus is 15 percent of total software purchase price; 24/7 emergency support adds 5 percent with a 1,540 USD minimum. Who buys it: municipal water and wastewater authorities and their integrators, particularly in North America, where the built-in DNP3 and radio telemetry support and the change-management audit trail line up with regulatory expectations. The trade-off is that VTScada is a closed proprietary environment with its own scripting language, a smaller integrator community than Ignition or Rockwell, and no real Linux story.

What people use it for

A municipal water authority with 60 remote pump stations on licensed radio that needs DNP3 polling and regulator-facing change records
An oil and gas gathering operator polling wellsite RTUs over intermittent cellular links with store and forward
A small utility that must produce a defensible budget number before going to council for capital approval
An integrator standardising on one product where historian, alarming and dialler costs are inside the licence rather than quoted separately

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 VTScada.

Licences are per installed PC rather than per system, so a redundant pair plus a development machine means paying three times unless you buy the discounted multi-server bundles.
Thin client licensing is by concurrent connection and is priced steeply at scale: unlimited thin clients on a 50,000 tag system costs 59,395 USD on top of the base licence, more than the base licence itself.
It is Windows only with no Linux or container deployment, which rules it out of modern edge and virtualised architectures that other SCADA products now support.
SupportPlus at 15 percent of the original software price must be maintained continuously; if you let it lapse you cannot simply resume, and reinstatement is negotiated rather than published.
The scripting environment and the integrator pool are both proprietary and small, so finding a second-source integrator in a region where Trihedral has thin coverage is genuinely difficult.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of VTScada

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.

VTScadavs
Ignition
Ignition: Pick Ignition if you want unlimited tags and clients on one server licence and Linux or container deployment.
VTScadavs
AVEVA System Platform
AVEVA System Platform: Pick AVEVA System Platform if you need a templated object model across many identical process units.
VTScadavs
AVEVA PI System
AVEVA PI System: Pick PI System if the goal is enterprise historisation and analytics rather than running the control room.

Pricing

What VTScada costs

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

Base licence up to 1,000 I/O

$3,395 /one-time

Runtime and full historian
All I/O drivers included
Alarms and events
90 days SupportPlus

Base licence up to 5,000 I/O

$4,295 /one-time

Runtime and full historian
Development add-on 4,100 USD
Alarm notification add-on 2,895 USD
Single thin client 3,395 USD

Single Server bundle, 5,000 I/O

$19,095 /one-time

Development node
Alarm notification
2 thin clients
1 year SupportPlus included

Single Server bundle, 50,000 I/O

$32,495 /one-time

Development node
Alarm notification
2 thin clients
1 year SupportPlus included

Dual Server Premium bundle, 50,000 I/O

$79,595 /one-time

Auto failover and sync across 2 sites
Unlimited thin clients
Redundant alarm notification
1 year 24/7 emergency support and training credit

Capabilities

Features

Automatic version control
Every configuration change is recorded, attributed and reversible across the whole system
Bundled historian
Unlimited-duration time-series storage with no separate historian licence
Alarm notification
Email, SMS, text-to-speech, VoIP and dial-in acknowledgement as a licensed add-on
Driver set included
DNP3, Modbus, CIP/ENIP, S7, SNMP, Motorola ACE, CalAmp and MDS radio diagnostics in every licence
Redundancy and sync
Automatic failover and configuration synchronisation across two or three servers
Thin clients
Concurrent PC and mobile connections shared across redundant servers
Idea Studio
Multi-developer online and offline development environment with change deployment
Slippy maps
Built-in geographic display with online or offline map tiles for distributed assets

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.

Is VTScada perpetual or subscription?

Perpetual. Licences are one-time purchases per installed PC, with an optional annual SupportPlus contract at 15 percent of the original software price.

Are drivers extra?

No. Standard and proprietary I/O drivers, the historian, trending, reporting and security are all included in the base licence.

What does support actually cost?

Annual SupportPlus is 15 percent of total software purchase price. Adding 24/7 emergency support is a further 5 percent with a 1,540 USD minimum.

Does it run on Linux?

No. VTScada is Windows only.

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for VTScada, 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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