Published April 9, 2026 · by Tyler Wray
When a customer in Madera or Visalia calls about a greenfield line, the platform conversation comes before the bid. It needs to. The wrong PLC choice locks a plant into a decade of spare-parts pain and the wrong integrator pool.
Rockwell (Allen-Bradley)
Rockwell still dominates US food and beverage. ControlLogix and CompactLogix are the safe bet when your maintenance team already speaks the language, your MES integrates with FactoryTalk, and your insurance carrier prefers a known platform. The trade-off is licensing cost — Studio 5000 seats and FactoryTalk activations add up fast.
Siemens
Siemens TIA Portal with S7-1500 hardware is the de facto choice for OEM equipment built in Europe. If you bought a German bottling line or an Italian packaging cell, the controls are almost certainly Siemens. Engineering hours per function tend to be lower than Rockwell once a team learns the toolchain. The hardware is dense and the diagnostics inside TIA Portal are excellent.
CODESYS-based platforms
Wago, Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, Festo and dozens of OEMs all use CODESYS underneath. For motion-heavy applications or where you want to avoid platform lock-in, this is a legitimate path. Maintenance staffing is the catch — finding a CODESYS technician in the Central Valley is harder than finding a Rockwell one.
How we decide with a customer
- What does your maintenance team already maintain?
- What platform does your enterprise SCADA / historian speak natively?
- Are there OEM cells already on the line that dictate part of the answer?
- What is the 10-year spare-parts story?