This isn't a classic head-to-head. Factry Historian actually stores its time series in InfluxDB (v1.x and v2.x are the supported back ends), with configuration, metadata and events in PostgreSQL. So the real question is whether you buy a finished process historian or build your own around a general-purpose time-series database.
What you get
- Factry Historian is a complete process historian: collectors, asset models, event processing and a Grafana plugin, sold as one product.
- InfluxDB is a database for event and time-series data. Collection, modeling and dashboards are pieces you add yourself, for example with InfluxData's Telegraf agent.
How they price
- Factry charges one flat fee per production site in Standard, Advanced or Enterprise tiers, with unlimited users, tags, collectors and integrations. Historian prices aren't published.
- InfluxDB 3 Core is free and open source (MIT or Apache-2.0). Enterprise is custom-priced by CPU configuration with a 30-day trial, and Cloud Serverless is usage-based.
Scale and collection
- Factry has no tag limits in any tier, and Enterprise adds multi-site support. Its collectors cover OPC UA, OPC DA, Modbus TCP and MQTT (JSON and Sparkplug B), buffering on disk until the historian acknowledges the data.
- InfluxDB 3 Core is a single node with no high availability; Enterprise adds HA, multi-node clustering and read replicas. Industrial collection isn't built in, but Telegraf has input plugins for OPC UA, Modbus, MQTT and Siemens S7.
One detail worth checking: InfluxDB 3 isn't listed among Factry's supported back ends, although InfluxDB 3 Core does accept the 1.x and 2.x write APIs.
Context, deployment and outputs
- Factry includes asset models in Standard, and asset prototypes, event processing and manual entry forms in Advanced. It runs on practically any Linux OS, on-premises or in the cloud, and outputs to Grafana, Seeq, Power BI, a REST API, MQTT forwarding and Parquet exports. Helpdesk support is in every tier, with 24/7 phone in Enterprise.
- InfluxDB offers an embedded Python VM for plugins and triggers, but no asset model is described on the pages we checked. Core runs on Linux, macOS or Docker; there are also managed Cloud Dedicated, Cloud Serverless and Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB options. Core has community support only; Enterprise comes with a support SLA.
Quick fit check
Pick Factry if you want a ready historian with collectors, asset models, events and dashboards, a flat site fee with no tag counting, and no collection and modeling layer of your own to maintain.
Pick InfluxDB if you have a data or IT team that will assemble collection, modeling and dashboards around a database, and you want a free open-source start or usage-based managed cloud.
The full side-by-side table with every source link is on PlantWired: Factry Historian vs InfluxDB. Related: Canary Historian vs InfluxDB, AVEVA PI System vs InfluxDB, InfluxDB vs TimescaleDB, and the guide Choosing a process historian.
Our data comes from public vendor pages and surely has gaps. If you run either in production and something's wrong, tell us in the comments and we'll fix it.
PlantWired is a free, vendor-neutral map of factory software. A short weekly brief on new integrations is at plantwired.vercel.app.
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