MQTT vs OPC UA: The Industrial Data Showdown

Almost every industrial data architecture eventually hits the same fork: MQTT or OPC UA? Pick right, and you're golden — pick wrong, and you'll spend the next few years fighting your own stack.

Brittle connections. Bloated payloads. A never-ending integration project that doesn't seem to ever pay off. Most of the time, these issues trace back to core architectural decisions — and most commonly, to the bad implementations which result from this indecisiveness.

OPC UA brings rich, structured, secure machine communication. MQTT brings lightweight, event-driven messaging that scales to thousands of endpoints. But which one do you choose — and is the need to choose the right question to even ask?

In this webinar, host Kristopher Sandoval and Kudzai Manditereza from HiveMQ put the two protocols head to head — how each moves data, where each breaks down, and which one actually fits your shop floor, your SCADA layer, and everything in between.

Kudzai and Kristopher will discuss:

• Live Demo A walkthrough of bridging OPC UA and MQTT data using FlowFuse in a real deployment scenario
• What MQTT and OPC UA each do well, and where each falls short
• Why the "winner" depends on your use case, not the marketing
• How device-level access and scalable, event-driven data can come from the same architecture
• How teams combine both protocols instead of choosing one
• Practical patterns for building a Unified Namespace that doesn't lock you in

This webinar is ideal for OT/IT engineers, automation architects, and industrial IoT practitioners deciding how to move data across modern factories. You'll leave knowing exactly which tool to reach for, when to use both, and how to make them work together.