FTA Studio vs Reliability Workbench (RWB)
Isograph's Reliability Workbench (RWB) is an integrated desktop suite that bundles FaultTree+, FMECA+, AvSim, RBD, Maintainability and a HAZOP module under one licence. It's the heavyweight option when a single team owns the whole reliability lifecycle. FTA Studio takes a different bet: focused, browser-based, IEC 61025 fault-tree analysis with FMEA / ETA / Monte Carlo in the Enterprise edition, and a free Community baseline.
At a glance
| FTA Studio | Reliability Workbench | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Browser, no install | Windows desktop, integrated suite |
| Entry pricing | $0 Community / $99 seat/yr | Quote-based, ~£5k–£15k+ /seat depending on modules |
| Free tier | Community is free forever | Time-limited eval only |
| OS support | Any OS with a browser | Windows only |
| Fault Tree Analysis | ✓ IEC 61025 | ✓ via FaultTree+ module |
| FMEA / FMECA | ✓ Enterprise (RPN scoring) | ✓ via FMECA+ module |
| Reliability Block Diagrams | — not yet supported | ✓ |
| Markov / Petri-net analysis | — | ✓ (AvSim+) |
| Maintainability / spares | — | ✓ (Maintainability+) |
| HAZOP | — | ✓ (Hazop+) |
| Monte Carlo | ✓ Enterprise | ✓ |
| Cross-module data sharing | ~ via JSON export | ✓ single project file |
| Industry templates included | 8 worked, free | Sample library |
| Time to first tree | Under 1 minute | 30+ minutes (install, licence, project setup) |
The honest differences
When to pick FTA Studio
- Your problem is fault trees, not the entire reliability stack. If you don't need RBD, Markov modelling, spares optimisation or HAZOP+, you're paying for a lot of unused suite.
- You want zero-install, zero-procurement. Open a browser, get to work. Especially valuable for consultants billing by the hour.
- You're cross-platform. RWB is Windows-only; FTA Studio runs identically on macOS, Linux, ChromeOS and Windows.
- Budget vs scope is tight. RWB's full suite licence is roughly two orders of magnitude more expensive than FTA Studio Enterprise per seat. The right comparison is "do I need the whole suite?" — if no, the maths is brutal.
- You want IEC-format JSON interchange. Open standard, no vendor lock-in.
When to pick Reliability Workbench
- Your team owns the entire reliability lifecycle. Cradle-to-grave: FTA → FMECA → RBD → Markov → spares → maintenance prediction. RWB's value is in the integration; pulling those pieces from separate tools is painful.
- You need RBD or Markov. FTA Studio doesn't yet do these.
- You're already invested in the Isograph ecosystem. Migration cost may exceed the per-seat saving.
- Your customer mandates it. Some defence and aerospace primes specify RWB.
What "integrated suite" really buys you
The strongest argument for RWB is data sharing across modules — a basic event in your fault tree can pull its λ from the FMECA, which pulls its component data from the parts library, which feeds the Markov state model. That's genuinely valuable in a 50-engineer reliability department doing the full V-model.
For most teams, though, the integration is partly aspirational. Each module is rigorous individually; the cross-module flows in practice are ad-hoc and require careful project setup. If your team is small, you're probably exporting CSVs between tools anyway. In that case, FTA Studio's IEC JSON export gets you 80% of the benefit at 1% of the cost.
Pricing for Reliability Workbench is based on customer-shared quotes and varies significantly by module configuration. Not affiliated with Isograph. Corrections welcome at support@ftastudio.app.