Inductive Automation's Ignition and ICONICS GENESIS (version 11, the successor to GENESIS64) are both full HMI/SCADA platforms that now market unlimited licensing. They get there differently: Ignition sells one perpetual license per server and publishes its prices, while GENESIS uses five license tiers and runs on a Windows, IIS and SQL Server stack.
Licensing model
- Ignition: one license per server. Standard licenses are perpetual (one-time); Cloud Edition is usage-based.
- GENESIS: five tiers, Pure, Plus, Professional, Prime and Platinum. All licenses on one network must be the same tier.
Tags and clients
- Ignition includes unlimited tags, unlimited clients and unlimited concurrent Designers per server license.
- GENESIS Pure is tag-limited (75, 150, 500 or 1,500 tags); Plus and above include unlimited GENESIS tags. Client entitlements are limited by hardware performance, not by the license.
Pricing (public pages, checked Oct 2026)
- Ignition has a full public price list: the platform from US$1,200, the Perspective module at US$11,225, the Industrial Historian suite at US$3,500 and the Alarm Management suite at US$3,200.
- GENESIS: we found no public price list on the official pages we reviewed.
Server OS and clients
- Ignition servers run on Windows, macOS and Linux, with iOS and Android clients through Perspective (HTML5).
- GENESIS runs on Windows 10/11 and Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 (Desktop Experience) and needs IIS and SQL Server. Its HTML5 WebHMI runs in Edge, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, with 3D graphics in the browser.
MQTT and Sparkplug B
- Ignition is built on open technologies including OPC UA and MQTT, with Cirrus Link MQTT modules on its price list.
- GENESIS does MQTT publish/subscribe (with brokers like Mosquitto or HiveMQ), has a Sparkplug B subscriber and talks to Azure IoT Hub over AMQP; the publisher and JSON support are add-ons.
Historian and alarms
- Ignition sells historian and alarm management as suites (prices above).
- GENESIS includes its Data Historian and Alarm Server in every tier, with ISA 18.2 compliance features.
Free options
- Ignition: a fully functional free trial and a free Maker Edition for non-commercial use.
- GENESIS: no free edition listed; unlicensed systems run in a "Demo" license tier.
Quick fit check
Pick Ignition if you need Linux or macOS servers, want to avoid a Windows/IIS/SQL Server dependency, or want to price the project yourself from a public list before talking to sales.
Pick GENESIS if you run Mitsubishi Electric equipment (it counts Mitsubishi Electric FA tags separately and integrates natively), or you need BACnet, SNMP and Azure IoT Hub connectivity in the same Windows-based package.
The full side-by-side table with every source link is on PlantWired: Ignition vs ICONICS GENESIS64. Related: Ignition vs VTScada, Ignition vs Node-RED, MES vs ERP vs SCADA, and all comparisons.
Prices and licensing terms change, and our data comes from public vendor pages, so it 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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