What a data historian actually costs
Historian pricing is unusually hard to find, and the pages that rank for the question are mostly written by vendors comparing themselves favourably to other vendors. So here are the numbers, taken from each vendor's own published pricing page, each one linked and dated.
We sell a historian, so read this with that in mind. The table includes options that are free, options that beat us on capability, and a section on where we are the wrong answer.
Last updated
The short answer
The single variable that decides the price is who runs the server. Not tag count, not features, not sample rate.
- If you run it yourself: free is genuinely available. Timebase is free forever with no tag limit; TDengine is free self-hosted up to 5,000 tags; InfluxDB OSS is free. You supply the machine, the disks, the patching, the backups and the restore.
- If someone else runs the historian: roughly $970 a month is the floor, and the smallest package on offer is 3,500–5,000 tags. There is no small managed SKU because nobody builds one.
- If someone else runs only the machine: a managed InfluxDB VM starts around $11 a month. Genuinely cheap, and the database on it — schema, retention, upgrades — is still yours to look after. That is a different purchase from the line above, and the table below keeps them in the same column on purpose.
- If you want a perpetual licence: $3,500 for the Ignition Industrial Historian suite, or $8,730 for Canary's 3,500-tag perpetual plus 18% a year — and you are still running the server.
Managed — somebody else runs it
| Product | Price | Smallest package | You operate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canary Private Cloud, Extra Small | $12,320 / year ≈ $1,027 / month | 3,500 | Nothing — Canary runs it | canarylabs.com/pricing read 2026-08-11 |
| TDengine Cloud, Starter | $970 / month | 5,000 | Nothing — TDengine runs it | tdengine.com/pricing read 2026-08-11 |
| Grafana Labs Grafana Cloud Pro (metrics) | $19 / month base, then from $6.50 per 1k series $19 / month + usage | 10k series included, 13-month retention | Nothing — but it is a metrics platform, not a historian | grafana.com/pricing read 2026-08-11 |
| Elestio Managed InfluxDB | From $11 / month $11 / month | Bounded by the VM you rent, not licensed | The InfluxDB inside it — schema, retention, upgrades | elest.io read 2026-08-11 |
Two of those four are historians. Grafana Cloud is a metrics platform — excellent at what it does, and it is in the table because it is what a lot of people actually end up using — but it has no OPC UA ingestion and no plant-floor story. Elestio is a managed VM running InfluxDB: cheap, and you still own the database inside it.
Self-hosted and perpetual — you run it
| Product | Price | Smallest package | You operate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canary On-premise subscription | $3,000 / year $250 / month | 3,500 | Server, OS, disks, backup, restore | canarylabs.com/pricing read 2026-08-11 |
| Canary On-premise perpetual | $8,730 once, then 18%/yr CustomerCare | 3,500 | Server, OS, disks, backup, restore | canarylabs.com/pricing read 2026-08-11 |
| Inductive Automation Ignition Industrial Historian suite | $3,500 once | Unlimited | Server, OS, the SQL database, backup, restore | inductiveautomation.com read 2026-08-11 |
| TDengine Self-hosted, All-in-One | Free up to 5,000 tags $0 | 5,000 free, then $12,500/yr at 7,500 | Everything | tdengine.com/pricing read 2026-08-11 |
| Flow Software Timebase | Free forever $0 | No tag limit | Everything | timebase.flow-software.com read 2026-08-11 |
Free tiers of the hosted time-series services
Worth its own table, because these are what most people try first and the limit that bites is not the one advertised on the front page. It is retention.
| Service | Free retention | Other limits | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| InfluxDB Cloud Serverless, Free Plan | 30 days | 5 MB per 5 minutes of writes, 2 buckets | docs.influxdata.com 2026-08-11 |
| Grafana Cloud, Free | 14 days | 10k active series per month | grafana.com/pricing 2026-08-11 |
If your reason for wanting hosted storage is “I want to still have this data next year”, neither free tier solves the problem you came with. That is not a criticism of either product — they are free tiers of usage-priced services, and retention is the thing usage-priced services charge for.
Where we sit
| Plan | Price | Tags | You operate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tag Historian Free | €0 | 5 | Nothing, except a collector container for MQTT or OPC UA |
| Tag Historian Pro | €9/month | 50 | Nothing, except a collector container for MQTT or OPC UA |
| Tag Historian Business | €89/month | 500 | Nothing, except a collector container for MQTT or OPC UA |
The argument is not that this is cheap in absolute terms — €0 and €9 are small numbers, but so is free. The argument is about the band: between free-if-you-run-it and about a thousand dollars a month, there is no historian that somebody else operates, and the smallest thing metered by tag is 3,500 of them. Cheaper managed hosting exists and is in the table above, but what it hands you is a database to administer. If you have forty tags and no appetite for either, that gap is where you live. There is a whole page about being below every vendor's minimum.
Where we are the wrong answer
A comparison that never concedes anything is an advertisement. Concretely, do not buy this if:
- You need more than 500 tags. That is the ceiling on the highest published plan. Canary's smallest package is seven times it. If you have thousands of signals you are a Canary, TDengine or Ignition customer and this page is not going to talk you out of it.
- You need a query language. There is no SQL, no Flux, no PromQL. There is a REST API, charts, alerts and exports. If your team's work is ad-hoc analytical queries, TimescaleDB or TDengine will serve you far better.
- You need SCADA, an HMI, or control. This stores history and alerts on it. It does not run your plant. Ignition's price includes an entire platform for a reason.
- You need it on your own hardware. There is no on-premise install. If data is not allowed to leave the site, Timebase is free and runs where you put it.
- You need a contractual uptime SLA. The self-service plans have none, and no service credits. That is a real difference from every vendor in the table above.
- You already run InfluxDB or TimescaleDB happily. Then you have solved this problem. Migrating to save a server you are not struggling with is not a good trade.
One more, specific to OPC UA
Our OPC UA collector is marked beta in the product and on its own documentation page. It does not browse the address space — every NodeId is typed by hand. For a machine with forty signals that is twenty minutes of work and it caps your tag count usefully. For a plant with two thousand, it is the wrong tool and a browse-and-select tree is worth paying for.
How this table was built
- Every price was read directly from the vendor's published pricing page on 2026-08-11, not from a third-party comparison or an analyst summary.
- Where a vendor bills annually, the monthly equivalent is a straight division with no discount assumed.
- All figures are in the currency the vendor publishes — USD for everyone above except us. We do not convert, because an invented exchange rate is one more number nobody can check.
- Vendors who publish no price are not in the table. AVEVA PI is the notable absence: there is no public price list, so anything we printed would be hearsay.
- No usage figures, no market-size claims, no “most customers”. We have not measured any of that.
Common questions
- How much does a data historian cost?
- It depends almost entirely on whether someone else runs it. Managed historians start around $970 a month: TDengine Cloud Starter is $970/month for 5,000 tags and Canary Private Cloud Extra Small is $12,320 a year, about $1,027 a month, for 3,500 tags. Self-hosted options are far cheaper or free — Timebase is free with no tag limit and TDengine is free up to 5,000 tags — but you supply and operate the server.
- What is the cheapest data historian?
- For licence cost, free ones exist: Timebase is free forever with no tag limits, TDengine is free self-hosted up to 5,000 tags, and InfluxDB OSS is free. All of them are software you install on a server you own, patch, back up and restore. The cheapest managed historian we can find is TDengine Cloud at $970 a month.
- Why is there no managed historian between free and about a thousand dollars a month?
- Because every historian package metered by tag starts at 3,500 to 5,000 of them. The market is built around plants with thousands of signals, so a site with forty tags is below the minimum order quantity rather than being served badly. Cheaper managed hosting does exist — a managed InfluxDB VM starts around $11 a month — but that is a database handed to you to run, not a historian someone else operates.
- Does a historian need a SCADA system?
- Not necessarily. Ignition sells its historian as part of a platform aimed at SCADA users, but a historian is fundamentally a store for time-series values — anything that can push readings over MQTT, OPC UA or an HTTP endpoint can fill one without a supervisory control layer.