Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a free version? Yes. Your first site is free — the complete platform, every protocol, plus the Normal Portal, secure remote access, and managed backups. Nothing is feature-gated.

Install it with one command on any Linux host with Docker, and sign in with your browser to activate. No license key, no registry token, no sales call. Here's exactly what happens.

How do I install it? One command:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/normalframework/nf-sdk/master/install.sh | sh

The installer prints a sign-in link before it downloads anything. You sign in, name your site, accept the terms, and the box pulls its images and licenses itself. We also support Azure IoT Edge, Fedora IoT on bare metal, and Balena — and enterprise fleets can skip the sign-in entirely with zero-touch auto-provisioning.

What are the limits on the free site? No point limits, no protocol limits, no feature gates. The constraints are:
  • One active free site per user. Activating a new one moves the entitlement off the old one — the portal warns you before this happens, so it is easy to move a free site to different hardware.
  • The free site is a 30-day trial of the complete platform. Re-provision from the portal to keep going.
After that it's $2,000 per building, perpetual. See pricing.
What does Normal talk to? Coming in from the building:
  • BACnet/IP, BACnet/SC, BACnet/Ethernet, and MS/TP — including MS/TP slave discovery, Network Port objects, segmentation, and proprietary properties, with BTL 26.1 conformance
  • Modbus TCP and Modbus RTU-over-TCP, with concurrent poll batching for tens of thousands of devices
  • Tridium Niagara over Fox — connect straight to existing stations without reconfiguring your JACE
  • Sparkplug B from any MQTT broker
  • Anything else, via a custom plugin you write or we build
Going back out:
  • Sparkplug B to your MQTT broker
  • PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB — every point and its metadata inserted automatically, ready for Grafana, Tableau, or Power BI
  • REST and gRPC APIs for everything the console can do
  • Local BACnet objects that other systems on the network can read and write
Shipping in the next release: an OPC-UA server that exposes the point database over opc.tcp so SCADA systems and historians can browse the equipment model, read live values, pull history, and command points; and UDMI in both directions — publishing your modeled equipment to a UDMI backend as a gateway device, and ingesting telemetry from external UDMI devices.
Do you count points? No. Normal is licensed per building with unlimited points. Discover a hundred thousand objects on a site and the price does not move — which is deliberate, because per-point licensing is exactly what prices small and mid-size buildings out of their own data.
Is your software secure? Normal runs in your environment, on your network. There are no inbound firewall rules to open — remote access works through an authenticated per-site tunnel that the gateway establishes outbound.

Writes are controlled by per-application guardrail policies you configure, commands carry a priority and a lifetime and relinquish themselves when they expire, and every schedule change is recorded in a sync log. We build with standard tools, consistent patterns, and no surprises in either our APIs or our frontend.

Is Normal a SaaS service with a subscription? No. The software runs locally in an environment you provide, and licenses are associated with a specific building. We never see your point data unless you choose to send it to us.

The Normal Portal is an optional management plane on top of that — it handles licensing, health monitoring, backups, and the remote access tunnel. You can run entirely local without it if you prefer. Licenses are perpetual by default, with subscription licensing available if that suits your business better.

Can I use AI agents with my building data? Yes. Normal ships an MCP server, so Claude and other MCP-capable agents can work with your sites directly — listing sites, exploring layers and unmodeled points, checking scan coverage, triggering rescans, reading live BACnet values, and helping write hooks.

It runs over the same authenticated tunnel and the same permissions as everything else, so an agent can only reach what you have already granted. The site needs to be connected to Normal Online, which the free tier includes. Setup instructions.

How do you know if the data is any good? Normal evaluates every point continuously and flags the ones that look wrong — stale, dead, intermittent, flatlined, railed at a sensor limit, returning a sentinel value like -9999, physically impossible for its units, or a counter that went backwards.

You build detection rules from presets and tag-based selectors, and you can backtest a rule against your history to see exactly what it would flag before enabling it. Flags are an indexed field on the point, so they appear as an Object Explorer column with live counts and work in any query. This is on by default.

How do you normalize data? The Normal Management Console includes a sophisticated set of tools for extracting and manipulating structure from BMS point names and other data sources, and allows you to quickly create repeatable processes around integrations. While Normal ships with a complete set of models for many different kinds of equipment, you can easily customize it to perfectly match your application requirements.​
How are you different from traditional integration frameworks? Mostly in shape. The established station-based frameworks are excellent at what they were built for — driver breadth and supervisory control at a single site. They are site-oriented, extended in a proprietary visual environment, licensed per driver and per point, and sold through a certified channel, which is why you cannot download one and try it this afternoon.

Normal is portfolio-native instead: fleet management, per-site tunnels, and zero-touch provisioning are core rather than add-ons; extension is JavaScript with open gRPC and REST APIs; the data model is Brick, Haystack 4, or your own, and it is portable out; and licensing is per building with unlimited points.

We are also not trying to rip out your stations. Normal speaks Fox natively and connects directly to existing Niagara stations without reconfiguring your JACE — most of our customers run both.

Where can I get a hardware gateway? Normal runs on any Linux host with Docker, so a small industrial PC is often all you need — the free tier runs comfortably on modest hardware. We also support common edge runtimes including Azure IoT Edge modules, Fedora IoT on bare metal, Balena, and the View Secure Edge platform.

If you would rather buy managed hardware, we offer gateways with 20,000-point capacity, automatic firmware updates, and remote access at $600 per device. We can also refer you to our network of integrators who have a variety of solutions.

Can I "write back" to the control system? Yes! Normal includes multiple integration points to impact the control systems, including the ability to directly write values using native BACnet services, a high-level "command" API for reliably creating overrides, and the ability to create new BACnet objects which can be read from the controls network.​
Can I white-label Normal? Absolutely. Contact us to learn about our OEM program.