Every so often someone asks how RoboVigil stacks up against Fabrico. It’s a fair question, because on the surface they look like they’re in the same world — both cloud platforms, both aimed at manufacturers, both talking about machine uptime. But once you look at what each one actually does, they’re solving different problems. Here’s an honest comparison.
What Fabrico is
Fabrico is a CMMS — a computerised maintenance management system — built in Sofia and now used across a fair bit of manufacturing, including several ABB factories in Bulgaria. It’s a good one. If your maintenance still runs on paper work orders, spreadsheet PM schedules and a whiteboard, Fabrico digitises all of that: work orders, preventive maintenance, spare-parts inventory, asset history, the lot. They’ve recently added an OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) module too, so they now describe themselves as OEE and CMMS rather than CMMS alone.
Credit where it’s due — that’s a solid product for a maintenance manager who wants to get organised. None of what follows is a criticism of Fabrico at what it’s built to do.
What RoboVigil is
RoboVigil isn’t a maintenance system. It’s machine monitoring. It connects directly to your robots and CNCs and tells you what they’re doing right now — running, stopped, faulted, and why — on your phone, with a live camera feed alongside the data.
We don’t manage your work orders. We tell you the moment a machine needs one.
The difference that matters: where the data comes from
This is the real split, and it’s worth being precise about it.
A CMMS is fundamentally a system for organising human activity. Even with an OEE module bolted on, the heart of Fabrico is people: someone raises a ticket, someone logs a repair, someone schedules the maintenance, someone closes the job. In practice it often involves terminals, tablets, QR codes or mobile devices that allow an operator standing at the line to flag a problem and call the maintenance team over. That’s a sensible design — for the environment it’s built for. It assumes a busy line with people on it: lots of manual processes, or at the very least operators overseeing the machines.
RoboVigil starts from the opposite assumption. The whole point of it is that there’s nobody there to push a button. We connect straight to the machine through its own native interfaces — an ABB IRC5 through Robot Web Services, a Universal Robots arm through its native interfaces, a FANUC through its diagnostic files — and read what the controller already knows. There’s no proprietary or specialist hardware to buy and no sensors to fit. If a site doesn’t already have IP cameras or a WireGuard-capable router, it may need those — but they’re inexpensive, off-the-shelf items, not a bespoke installation. Nobody’s filling in a form, and nobody’s pressing a button. The machine reports itself. That’s why RoboVigil can monitor a robot at 2am just as effectively as it can at 2pm.
The lights-out test
Here’s a simple way to tell the two apart. If your factory runs lights-out — nobody on the floor — which system still works?
Fabrico’s strength is the maintenance team. With nobody there, there’s nobody raising tickets or closing jobs, and the human side of the system goes quiet. RoboVigil talks directly to the machines, so the factory can be completely empty and you’ll still see the status of every robot and CNC on your phone. That’s the whole point of it.
If the promise of automation is freedom from the factory floor, the monitoring has to be autonomous too. Otherwise you’ve just moved the human from running the machine to babysitting the system that watches the machine.
Cameras: the bit nobody else does
There’s one more difference worth drawing out, because it’s become central to what RoboVigil is.
Fabrico’s OEE module uses computer vision in places to help validate output — fair enough. But it’s not the same as having eyes on the cell. In RoboVigil the camera feed is built into every machine’s page, sitting next to its live data, and screenshots are tied straight into the error log. Open a fault and you see what the cell actually looked like at that moment — the dropped part, the snagged harness, the thing the numbers can’t describe — right beside the alarm.
Hardly any monitoring or maintenance system gives you that. It’s one of the clearest reasons people choose RoboVigil once they’ve seen it.
Quick comparison
| RoboVigil | Fabrico | |
|---|---|---|
| Core product | Machine monitoring | Maintenance management (CMMS) with OEE module |
| Data source | Direct from the machine via native connectors | Human input + IoT gateway / sensor integration |
| Hardware required | No proprietary or specialist hardware — works with off-the-shelf IP cameras and a WireGuard-capable router | Sensors, IoT gateways, shared tablets |
| Installation | Software-only, remote setup | On-site integration project |
| Training | Download the app and go | Rollout and adoption programme |
| Works lights-out | Yes | Not really — built around the maintenance team |
| Pricing | £150/machine/month | Per-user tiered plans |
| Camera feeds | Live feeds integrated into machine pages and error logs | Computer vision for OEE validation |
| Push alerts | Automatic, direct from machine alarms | From operators flagging issues / human-created work orders |
| Designed for | Machines running with nobody overseeing them | Staffed lines with operators present |
Who should use what
Choose Fabrico if you’re a maintenance manager on a busy line — lots of manual processes, or operators stationed at the machines — who wants to replace paper work orders and spreadsheet PM schedules with a proper digital system, give those operators a way to flag problems, and start tracking OEE. It’s a good CMMS and does that job well.
Choose RoboVigil if you’re a factory owner, operations manager or integrator who wants to see what your machines are doing right now when there’s nobody standing over them — without being there, without installing hardware, and without putting a workforce through a new system.
Honestly, they’re not really competitors — they’re different tools for different jobs, and there’s no reason you couldn’t run both. But if someone tells you Fabrico does machine monitoring, ask them the one question that settles it: does the machine talk, or does a human have to talk for it?
RoboVigil is a cloud-based machine monitoring platform for manufacturers and integrators. No proprietary hardware. No installation project. No training programme. Try it free for 30 days:
