Modbus Communications: Keep, Bridge, or Replace?

This session is going to pit ModBus against the modern data stack to settle where a 47-year-old protocol still belongs. You'll get an honest, practical map of where Modbus genuinely wins, where it quietly costs you, and how to free the data trapped in your legacy devices with FlowFuse.

Why Modbus Communications Still Run the Modern Factory Floor

If the world ended tomorrow, two things would persist - cockroaches and ModBus. It's the world's most stubborn manufacturing protocol - and there's a good chance it's powering a big chunk of your shopfloor (and secretly powering some innovative solutions and systems).

Imagine inheriting a factory floor where half your devices speak a language older than the world wide web. A protocol from 1979, running on hardware that has outlived the companies that installed it, still faithfully moving the water and gas that keep a country running. It works — until you're asked to feed that data to the cloud, to an AI model, to a cross-functional team that needs real-time visibility now. Suddenly you're staring at register maps, wrestling with security and context, and being told by every vendor that the only path forward is to rip it all out.

Modbus vs. OPC UA, MQTT, and Sparkplug: Settling the Protocol Debate

Between the protocol that refuses to die and the "Modbus killers" that promised to replace it, a lot of good engineers get paralyzed — and their most valuable data stays stranded on the plant floor. In this webinar we will… settle it — live.

Join Mandeep Sidhu and Kristopher Sandoval in this protocol thunderdome, taking a deep dive into ModBus - and its competitors (OPC UA, MQTT, and Sparkplug) to figure out where it works, where it doesn't, and what lessons you can take to your modern data solution.

In this webinar Mandeep and Kristopher will dig into where Modbus wins outright, where it burns you, and why the honest answer is almost never "rip and replace."

What This Modbus Communications Webinar Will Cover

• The origin story: how Modicon invented Modbus, gave it away royalty-free, and accidentally guaranteed its immortality.
• How it works: a walk through the detailed and complicated mechanics of ModBus itself, and how you can bridge it to modern solutions.
• The honest scorecard: where Modbus beats OPC UA and MQTT on simplicity and ubiquity — and where it loses on security, context, and discovery.
• Modbus in the wild: what it actually looks like across manufacturing, water, gas, and utility infrastructure where downtime isn't an option - and how consumers still in Industry 3.0 leverage DataOps to transform legacy into potential.
• Building the bridge: funneling legacy Modbus data into a unified namespace, cloud databases, and AI queries through FlowFuse — no rip-and-replace required.
• Interactive Q&A Session: bring your own "should I keep Modbus or move on?" dilemma and put it to an honest debate.

Live Demo: Bridging Modbus Data with FlowFuse and Node-RED

Expect a live look at Modbus data flowing through Node-RED via FlowFuse into a dashboard and a unified namespace — your 1979 device joining 2026 in real time.

Who Should Attend

This webinar is ideal for Controls Engineers, OT/IIoT Solutions Architects, and Plant Operations Managers who want to stop treating legacy protocols as a liability and start treating them as an asset — without drowning in custom integration code. Don't miss out on joining us live to watch the oldest argument in industrial automation play out fairly, and to leave with a practical path for turning the gift Modicon gave the world into the data that powers your next decade.