GUIDE6 min readUpdated Jun 2026

CODESYS on Raspberry Pi

The industrial-grade commercial soft-PLC runtime — a polished IEC 61131-3 IDE, broad fieldbus support, and a Pi runtime licence.

SHORT ANSWER

CODESYS is the industrial standard for soft PLCs: a mature IEC 61131-3 IDE with strong fieldbus support (EtherCAT, Profinet, Modbus, OPC-UA) and an official Raspberry Pi runtime. It's the choice when you want vendor-grade tooling and protocols on a Pi, and it carries a runtime licence rather than being free like OpenPLC.

IEC 61131-3
full language + IDE
CODESYS
EtherCAT/Profinet
industrial fieldbuses supported
CODESYS
Licensed
per-runtime, not per-seat-free
CODESYS

01Why teams pick CODESYS

It feels like a real PLC environment because it is one — used across industrial vendors. The fieldbus coverage and debugging tools are a step beyond the open-source options, which matters when you're integrating with existing industrial networks.

02The trade-off

You pay for a runtime licence and you're inside a commercial ecosystem. That's reasonable when the protocols and tooling save you weeks; it's overkill for a simple monitoring node where OpenPLC or Node-RED would do.

Common questions

The ones we're asked on every first call.

With a real-time-patched runtime it's far tighter than stock Linux, and good enough for many control loops. For the hardest real-time, the same MCU-co-processor pattern applies.

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