Canary and TDengine are two of the few historians that publish their prices, and both price by tag count. Canary is a classic process historian with its own lossless storage, store-and-forward collectors and unlimited Axiom and Excel clients. TDengine sells a time-series database plus an industrial data platform (TDengine All-in-One) that is free up to 5,000 tags, with an AGPL-3.0 open-source core.

What each one is

  • Canary: a process historian with its own storage, Axiom trending, Excel clients and store-and-forward collectors.
  • TDengine: a time-series database for Industrial IoT (TDengine TSDB) plus an industrial data management platform (TDengine IDMP), sold together as TDengine All-in-One.

Pricing (public pages, checked Nov 2026)

  • Canary prices by tag count, perpetual or annual subscription, with Enterprise licensing for unlimited tags. Example: 3,500 tags cost US$9,970 for the license plus US$1,795 CustomerCare perpetual (US$11,765), or US$3,980 per year as a subscription. There is no free tier on the pricing page.
  • TDengine prices by tag count, annual or perpetual, with high availability at +30% and over 500,000 tags on quote. It's free up to 5,000 tags, including small production use (optional support is US$3,375/year). Example: 10,000 tags cost US$15,500/year or US$38,750 perpetual; 100,000 tags cost US$46,000/year or US$115,000 perpetual.

Open source

  • Canary is commercial software under its own Software License Agreement.
  • TDengine's core database, clustering included, is open source as TDengine OSS under AGPL-3.0.

Data collection

  • Canary has collectors for OPC UA, OPC DA, MQTT Sparkplug B (or JSON), SQL and CSV, not separately licensed, and Store & Forward buffers data to disk during outages.
  • TDengine has zero-code connectors for MQTT, Kafka, OPC, PI System and more, plus edge-to-cloud replication, in all plans.

Analytics and clients

  • Canary includes unlimited Axiom and Excel clients; an ODBC connector is an upgrade.
  • TDengine includes SQL, stream processing, AI forecasting and anomaly detection, data modeling, dashboards, event management and an Excel add-in.

Managed cloud and deployment

  • Canary Private Cloud runs on US Azure, from US$12,320/year for 3,500 tags plus a US$1,500 one-time setup. Self-hosted, the historian server sits with collectors installed close to the data source.
  • TDengine Cloud runs on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, from US$970/month (Starter, 5,000 tags). Self-hosted, it ships Linux and Windows packages, Docker or Kubernetes, for edge, VM, on-prem server or cloud.

Quick fit check

Pick Canary if you want a proven process historian with lossless storage, unlimited trending clients and support included in the price, or your plant runs OPC and Sparkplug B sources and you want unlicensed collectors with store-and-forward.

Pick TDengine if you're under 5,000 tags and want a free production start, want an open-source core you can inspect, or want SQL, stream processing, AI analytics and PI System or Kafka ingestion in one product.

The full side-by-side table with every source link is on PlantWired: Canary Historian vs TDengine. Related: InfluxDB vs TDengine, Factry Historian vs Canary Historian, the TDengine profile, and Choosing a process historian.

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.