Which brand of PLC do your guys think is the most popular?

PLC / SPS , one cannot say which brand is famous....Mostly Allen bradley is dominating in north and south America while Siemens is dominating with its PLC /SPS in Europe , Beckhoff PLC have improvised Scanning Cycle time for high process equipments like High speed hot filling machines... There is not competitor for Beckhoff .. its niche PLC/SPS they have developed..Cheap PLCs from China / Korea have also entered Indian market but no one wants to take risk... Omron , GE Fanux , VIPA are some brands which are not positioned in indian market as per price- performance .....Going by user statistics... Siemens and Rockwell are neck to neck...in PLC brand popularity.. because of their user friendly platform of programming.. former advantage is Structured Text while latter has advantage of Ladder comfortability.

Hey.. you can do some trick logic (and cool art) with the page format and that vertical scan thing that you can't do on horizontal rung scanning. The best way I've found to think about Modicon is that every page is a rung. There for if you want pretty well the same scan results as a Rockwell scan, only put one coil per page.

It varies by geographic area, by industry, by application and over time. Mitsubishi seem to be quite big in the food industry, here in the UK, for example. Traditionally. the paper industry were big on Siemens, perhaps because of the tendency for many British paper mills to be Scandanavian owned. Large corporations sometimes standardise across their sites. I have been on many sites in the UK that have PLC equipment from half a dozen or more different manufacturers. Pity the poor maintenance engineers on those sites.

I feel this discussion has lost its way and the initial question asked by the gent who clearly
was looking for some guidance on the way forward must be lost and confused. It is clear from the various comments that AB & Siemens are the most widely used controllers. The question is what does one want from your controller? If it is a simple controlling task then I guess any controller on the market will do and the programming logic behind it are all simple. If you are looking for an elaborate controlling task for Industrial automation then for sure AB & Siemens come into there own and yes the logic behind that now becomes more complex because the task itself is far more complex. When it comes to interfacing with your drives, motor protection, HMI and SCADA then I believe Siemens has the edge on the market in particular with their new TIA portal.

My suggestion to the gent that initiated the original question have a look rather than at the controller itself but who in your area can offer you the best support and if this is satisfactory from all parties then go with Siemens you wont go wrong.

My opinion also it depends on industries and budget. The Rockwell (Allen Bradley) is the most popular and rugged. It was expensive but is quite good, with good hardware and software. However Siemens and Rockwell are brand popularity with good Proven Track Record (PTR). Further GeFaunc LM90 series also quite good with minimal cost.

The brand of PLC is less important then the tools, and efficiencies that it gives your employer is key. When you look at the cost of the automation as a percentage of the Cost of Goods, it is almost zero. So buy the PLC that based on your in house resources know how to make the technology work.