CNC Control Market Shares: What Are the Most Popular Controls?

As of this morning, we have 200 responses to our CNC Control Survey.  While we’re picking up some new controls here and there, the percentages haven’t materially changed much from the first 100 responses, so it is time to summarize the results.

Pro vs Hobby Controls

The hobby controls narrowly edged out professional controls by a margin of 8%:

Hobby Control Market Share

First up is a breakdown between the two big gorillas, Mach3 and LinuxCNC, versus everything else:

 I suspect most Mach3 users wouldn’t have guessed LinuxCNC was as big as it is.  I know I was surprised.  I wish I had data over time in order to understand whether it was always this big or whether it has been steadily gaining share at Mach3′s expense.  The group labeled “Other” is also larger than I would’ve expected, and I believe it reflects a crop of relatively new software that’s been hitting the market.  Here is how “Other” breaks down:

This market is still very fragmented, with some old controls and some new.  Turbo CNC still runs on DOS, for example, while products like KFLOP are extremely modern and are full motion control solutions.  It will be interesting to watch the evolution of these sorts of products.

For those with an entrepreneurial bent, a very typical thing to do would be to take Mach3′s 66% share plus the sometimes quoted figures that Mach3 has sold 60-80,000 paid copies and assume the overall market today for Hobby controls is therefore 80,000 / 66% which is about 120,000 units.  Realistically, its probably much larger because not everyone who uses these controls will be one who frequently participates in Internet surveys on sites like CNCCookbook.  For comparison, CNCZone says they have 220,000 registered members.  That’s probably a closer number, but still small.  In addition, most of the “Maker 3D Printer” world seems to be off on its own and they are CNC’ers too.  But, we could say that in our wildest dreams, the total addressable hobby marketplace is perhaps 500,000 strong today.  I would imagine we’ll see that grow steadily over time as it gets easier to do, more popular, less expensive, and more common so more people are exposed to it.

This is a good time to mention that while I have arbitrarily broken these controls down into categories like “Hobby” and “Pro”, they are arbitrary and no doubt some of the makers of the software will object to being categorized as “Hobby” class controls.  Really all it means as that these controls are considerably less expensive.  I know for a fact that there are OEM’s selling pro-grade machinery that runs software like Mach3.  Tormach is one great example.  There are no doubt many Tormachs laboring daily to produce parts for a fee, a very professional undertaking indeed.

Pro Category CNC Control Market Share

Moving over to the Pro category, we see the following breakdown:

As one would expect, mighty Fanuc has the largest share at 26%, but it is by no means as commanding as Mach3′s share is over in the Hobby market.  Haas also has very large share which is all the more impressive when you consider that they only install them on Haas machines.  That makes it a reflection on just how many machines they’re selling relative to other makes.  Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are Heidenhain, Centroid, and Seimens, respectively, which reflects well on the German and CNC Retrofit markets.

As befits an old and well-established market, there is a long tail of various controls categorized in the “Other” category that make up a market almost as large as Fanuc.  Here are the players there:

While Bandit, Dynapath, and Okuma have a slight advantage, it’s pretty much a free-for-all among the rest of the players.

We’ll let the survey continue to run so we can gather data on which canned post profiles we need to create for G-Wizard G-Code Editor before we ship version 1.0.  If you use GWE, please vote so we can be sure you’re covered.  If you don’t, what are you waiting for?  It’s free in Beta test and does a whole bunch of neat stuff.  Sign up today!

13 Comments

• 
  Robert Grzesek 2012/08/02 at 1:03 pm

  I’ve noticed the upward trend on EMC2 over time. I never used to get users asking about a MeshCAM post for EMC2 but it has been steadily picking up over time. The only thing that I can point to is the number of machine vendors that are shipping EMC2 with their machines.

  My only point of difference with you is the characterization of EMC2 and Mach3 as hobby-grade. I doubt that anybody is retrofitting their Haas with a PC to run EMC/Mach but I speak to a number of users who run their machines all day long at work on EMC2 and Mach3.

  If anything it shows the incredible diversity of CNC applications.

  Reply
  • 
    SiteOwner 2012/08/02 at 1:23 pm

    Robert, we agree on the hobby-grade thing. That’s why I made the remarks I did with the Tormach example. At the same time, it clearly doesn’t go in the same category as Fanuc, so it needs to be called someting.

    BTW, the #1 source of “Other” in the actual survey was folks making it clear that it’s now called “LinuxCNC”.

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    • 
      Robert 2012/08/02 at 3:13 pm

      Sorry Bob- it looks like I was reading a little too fast and missed that. It would be interesting to see how the number of “industrial” Mach3/EMC2 users compares to Fanuc and Haas. Years ago I would have guessed it to be a much lower. Now I’m less sure.

      Reply
• 
  MuellerNick 2012/08/02 at 1:04 pm

  It’s Siemens, not Seimens.

  Interesting number having a Haas lathe and a MAHO mill with LinuxCNC.

  Nick

  Reply
• 
  Todd 2012/08/05 at 7:37 pm

  Unfortunately I don’t think your survey tells you much except what sort of people saw and responded to it. I think a better tell of what kinds of controls are most popular would be some kind of compilation of what controls are on all of the used machines advertised for sale on the net at a given moment.

  Reply
  • 
    SiteOwner 2012/08/06 at 8:35 pm

    Todd, every survey tells you no more than what sort of people saw and responded to it. If we collate the kinds of controls that are on all the used machines for sale we’ll have an excellent way of telling which controls people wanted to quit using for something newer, LOL.

    The more interesting questions are was the survey reasonable unbiased and did it see enough traffic to be statistically significant? For this site, we get about 1 million visitors a year from all walks, and I believe it is reasonably balanced between pro and hobby. I collated the results when we had 200 responses, but more importantly, when I saw that the relative strengths of the responses had been stable since the first 100. If they hadn’t, I would’ve waited.

    Waiting is a tricky business too. For example, someone made an announcement over on the LinuxCNC boards that sent a bunch of them scurrying over, so after I collated the results the survey became very skewed towards LinuxCNC instead of Mach3.

    As Mark Twain said, Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

    In the end, it was interesting, and I got what I needed, which is an idea of which canned control posts I need to include with G-Wizard Editor 1.0.

    Thanks everyone for participating!

    Reply
• 
  Bob Garrish 2012/08/08 at 8:11 am

  Dynomotion is the company that makes the KFLOP, so they have 1% of the Pro and 1% of the Hobby market apparently

  I would distinguish between Hobby and Pro controls by whether they’re software-based or hardware-based controls. Mach and LinuxCNC muddy up the waters a bit since they can be used to control hardware or directly as controls, but in the hardware control mode they’re just frontends. Alternately, I’d ask the question “Would a production shop with 5 older Haas or Thermwood machines conceivably retrofit them with this control if it were free”.

  Reply
  • 
    SiteOwner 2012/08/08 at 8:51 am

    Bob, thanks for commenting. I can’t say I agree with the “just frontends” remark. They go well beyond from a couple of perspectives.

    First, if we think about what the control does, it can be looked at as having two functions:

    - It interprets the g-code dialect it supports in order to produce a notion of which motions the program is commanding.

    - It converts those motion commands to whatever electrical impulses are needed to make the machine move reliably and accurately.

    Either part is about equally as complex and equally as critical to success. The more sophisticated trajectory planners straddle the line between the two as they don’t have to know just what’s happening at the moment, but what’s about to happen soon.

    The hardware-based controls (BTW, everything is software in the end, but I know what you mean) are focused on the back half. As we have said, you can apply that now to Mach3 and LinuxCNC, so it starts to be a much less useful distinction.

    In the end, I don’t see a good distinction beyond cost. Would a production shop retrofit with Mach3 or LinuxCNC?

    Well, some already have. For those that don’t, they will argue that they’re too busy making parts and money to waste time on the hobby controls. For them I would ask, “Then why do you have time to retrofit at all?”

    It all devolves into the arguments I see among software developers about which operating system or which language is best. Mostly, it is much sound and fury signifying nothing. Beyond that, there is a lot of religion. Eventually, there is a small kernel of facts that are rarely used in the sport of Geek Food Fighting.

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• 
  Terry Wellman 2012/08/13 at 7:02 pm

  Bob,

  Like Robert, I too use Mach 3 to control three of the machines in our pro shop. We have two Bridgeport Series II’s and a Sherline 4400 lathe running Mach. We also have a modified Sherline 2000 mill running DeskCNC. However, that machine is going to be converted to Mach in order that everyone only needs to know one control application.

  I know quite a few others who are using Mach to control machines in their shops where they make their living. It would be interesting to find out how many use Mach in a professional shop environment.

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  John Russell 2012/09/24 at 10:35 am

  I dont use mach,but I do have 2 lathes and a Matsurra VMC retrofitted with EMC2,actually one of the lathes has a Delta Tau.Anyway,these machines run everyday.Im more impressed with Linux then windows and the EMC is a neat project,infinately easier the the DT.I suspect it has its limits when it comes to hi speed machining.
  I know for a fact the percentages for both GE and Yasnac are higher then 4 %.At one time GE owned the cnc market.

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  • 
    SiteOwner 2012/09/24 at 10:43 am

    GE = Fanuc starting in 1986. They dissolved the joint venture in 2009. The GE numbers should probably be merged with Fanuc.

    Cheers,

    BW

    Reply
• 
  David 2012/10/05 at 4:51 pm

  This is about the third time I’ve come to this survey. I haven’t retrofitted a machine yet but have thought about it for both a project at work and for an effort at home. One thing that muddies the water is companies like dynomotion that supply plugins for software like Mach. How do you count a machine running Mach witha KFlop back end?

  As it is I find KFlop a very interesting approach to the machine control problem. Well I guess I should say Dynomotion as KFlop is apparently the hardware.

  Reply
• 
  Dan Hammerstron 2013/03/16 at 8:14 pm

  Yes, the waters muddy : No mention of shopbot and its 20k plus machines out there, and its
  its propietary software also the many machines from china running thewre software.

  Reply