Your team might believe your current visualization and analysis software is “good enough,” but in reality, “good enough” is holding you back.
When you examine your current robotics development stack for performance, bug tracking, visualization and data analysis efficiency, unified workflows, or data pipeline costs, you’ll likely uncover inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and outright gaps in critical capabilities.
If companies aren’t using Foxglove, they’re likely relying on a patchwork of open-source tools and custom code, which often results in:
Juggling multiple tools to analyze data or manually converting formats to ensure compatibility can create bottlenecks. Redundant processes, like reanalyzing the same data due to a lack of centralized storage or repeating debugging steps because insights weren’t shared effectively, further compound these delays.
These inefficiencies don’t just slow down development—they also drain resources, increase operational costs, and hinder collaboration across teams. Ultimately, they create a cycle of lost productivity that prevents robotics companies from reaching milestones on time, leaving them vulnerable to competitors who have streamlined their workflows.
Custom code and open-source tools are often “free like a puppy,” requiring ongoing care and attention. Someone on your team must maintain the code, enhance its capabilities to keep up with increasing demands, and divert focus away from your company’s core mission of advancing autonomy in your robots. This hidden cost of “free” can slow innovation and strain resources better spent on driving your robotics development forward.
Data often ends up scattered—on individual laptops, shared drives, left on the robot, or, worse, lost forever. This fragmentation leads to inconsistencies and confusion about where to find the right data or which tool to use to interpret it. Without a single source of truth, teams lack the cohesive and unified experience needed for effective collaboration and quick, informed decision-making.
As robotics projects expand, the volume and complexity of data generated can quickly overwhelm systems that were originally built for smaller datasets or teams. Legacy tools and patchwork solutions often falter under the strain, leading to slow processing times, higher storage costs, and difficulty retrieving relevant information. Collaboration becomes increasingly challenging as teams grow, with critical insights siloed across individuals or departments due to fragmented workflows and disconnected tools. Adapting these systems to support new robots, sensors, or datasets often requires significant effort, diverting resources from core development tasks. Performance bottlenecks arise as data volumes increase, disrupting real-time decision-making and slowing development cycles. Without systems designed for scalability, these challenges compound, limiting growth and innovation just when teams need to accelerate the most.
Data silos in robotics development hinder collaboration and prevent teams from gaining holistic insights. When video streams, sensor outputs, and other data types are processed separately, critical connections between data sources can be missed. This fragmentation slows workflows, complicates debugging, and limits innovation. By integrating multimodal data into a unified environment like Foxglove, silos are eliminated, enabling seamless collaboration and more efficient problem-solving.
Incomplete tools limit teams’ ability to fully debug, analyze, and innovate. Gaps in codec support or multimodal data integration can obscure critical insights and force inefficient workflows, slowing progress and stifling creativity. By enabling seamless data analysis and visualization, tools like Foxglove unlock the full potential of robotics systems, driving faster problem-solving and innovation.
Saying “it’s good enough for now” is simply turning a blind eye to the future, ignoring the inevitable challenges of scaling. This short-sighted mindset can lead to very real consequences—ranging from inefficiencies and technical debt to stunted growth and missed opportunities for innovation.
When work is fragmented across tools, leaders make decisions based on incomplete or incorrect information. There ends up being analysis that nobody trusts because everyone knows the underlying data is incomplete and workflows are fragmented.
Custom solutions require continuous updates, bug fixes, and support from engineering teams. This ongoing investment of time and resources diverts focus from core development and innovation, increasing operational expenses.
Fragmented tools and inefficient workflows frustrate employees, reducing productivity and engagement. Constantly troubleshooting suboptimal systems can lead to burnout, dissatisfaction, and higher turnover, especially among skilled professionals. Losing top talent disrupts projects and increases costs for hiring and training replacements, while poor team morale further slows progress. Companies with outdated workflows risk damaging their reputation, making it harder to attract and retain top-tier talent.
By adopting streamlined, effective tools like Foxglove, businesses can enhance employee satisfaction, boost retention, and position themselves as attractive, innovative employers, ultimately driving better team performance and organizational success.
Switching to Foxglove empowers teams to drive greater innovation, accelerate development timelines, and significantly reduce costs.
The biggest differences:
“The lift on building custom robotics development tooling, specifically visualization, is so high that it detracts from the goal of building features and autonomy for the robots.”
Vibhav Altekar, Co-founder & VP of Software, Saronic
The preference for open-source tools is understandable, especially among engineers who value transparency, community-driven development, and the flexibility to customize solutions. Open-source software often offers a cost-effective starting point for teams looking to build tailored solutions. However, while open source provides many advantages, it also comes with limitations that can hinder scalability, efficiency, and long-term productivity—areas where Foxglove provides significant value.
Foxglove isn’t about abandoning open source; it’s about enhancing what teams can do with it. Many robotics developers already use open-source tools, such as ROS (Robot Operating System), which Foxglove fully supports. Foxglove integrates seamlessly with these tools, offering a polished, purpose-built layer on top of open-source ecosystems to fill gaps in usability, scalability, and performance.
By adopting Foxglove, engineers retain the benefits of their open-source tools while gaining a platform that simplifies workflows, eliminates inefficiencies, and scales effortlessly with their needs.
While open-source tools are flexible, they often require significant customization and maintenance to meet specific requirements. This ongoing effort demands engineering time and resources that could be better spent on core product development. Foxglove alleviates this burden by providing a pre-built, robust, and actively supported platform that’s optimized for robotics workflows.
Engineers can still leverage open-source components where they add value, but Foxglove removes the need to “reinvent the wheel” for visualization and debugging, saving valuable time and effort.
Building and maintaining custom solutions from open-source components can shift focus away from innovation. Teams often get bogged down solving problems related to fragmented tools, inconsistent experiences, or scalability challenges. Foxglove allows engineers to redirect their energy toward solving complex robotics challenges and pushing the boundaries of their projects, rather than managing infrastructure and workflows.
Foxglove is designed to handle multimodal data streams and advanced visualization needs out of the box, capabilities that are often difficult to achieve with open-source solutions alone. Engineers working on robotics applications benefit from seamless integration of video, telemetry, and sensor data in a single platform—delivering a more cohesive experience than pieced-together open-source tools can provide.
Foxglove provides dedicated support and a clear development roadmap, ensuring that engineers have access to timely improvements and reliable assistance when needed.
Choosing Foxglove doesn’t mean giving up the values of open source—it means leveraging a professional-grade solution that complements and enhances existing open-source workflows. By addressing the limitations of open-source tools, Foxglove empowers engineers to focus on building better robotics systems with greater efficiency, scalability, and ease.
Foxglove actively contributes to open-source projects, notably ROS and MCAP. The company developed MCAP, a modular, performant, and serialization-agnostic container file format for pub/sub messages, primarily intended for use in robotics applications.
Additionally, Foxglove fosters a community that builds customizations using its extensions framework. Developers can create custom panels tailored to specific workflows, integrating them seamlessly into Foxglove’s interface. The company provides starter templates and commands through the create-foxglove-extension package to simplify the development process. This collaborative environment encourages sharing and contributing to the extension registry, enhancing the platform’s versatility and adaptability.
Engineers often spend significant time maintaining, troubleshooting, and integrating open-source tools or custom-built systems. These tasks pull valuable resources away from core product development, stretching timelines and increasing operational costs.
Foxglove eliminates much of this manual overhead by providing a ready-to-use platform that is efficient, reliable, and optimized for robotics workflows. The hours saved in debugging fragmented tools or creating custom integrations quickly add up, often exceeding the cost of the software itself. By streamlining workflows and enabling faster debugging, Foxglove empowers teams to meet deadlines and bring products to market faster, a direct financial benefit.
Incomplete or inefficient tools can lead to missed insights, delayed problem resolution, and costly errors in robotics systems. A debugging or visualization gap might delay identifying critical issues, leading to setbacks that are far more expensive than the cost of Foxglove.
By providing comprehensive visualization and analysis capabilities, Foxglove helps teams catch problems earlier, reduce downtime, and avoid expensive rework or project delays.
Many free or low-cost tools struggle to scale as teams grow or datasets expand, often requiring expensive customizations or new tools. Foxglove is designed to handle increasing complexity, from larger teams to higher-resolution video streams and more demanding data integrations. This scalability ensures that the initial investment continues to deliver value as needs evolve, avoiding the costs of rebuilding or replacing systems later.
Engineering teams can frame Foxglove as an investment that drives measurable returns. By highlighting productivity gains, faster time-to-market, reduced maintenance, and improved team efficiency and morale, teams can make a compelling case to stakeholders that the software pays for itself over time.
For teams with limited budgets, Foxglove offers tiered pricing, starting with a free version. These allow teams to experience the benefits of the platform with minimal upfront commitment, providing an opportunity to demonstrate its value before scaling up.
Rather than viewing Foxglove as a cost, it’s more accurate to see it as an investment in efficiency, scalability, and innovation. By reducing time spent on inefficiencies, eliminating maintenance headaches, and accelerating development cycles, Foxglove enables teams to do more with less—delivering value that far outweighs the initial expense.
“We expected just easier visualization, but it turned out to be much more—unlocking invaluable efficiency for all our developers.”
Robert Sun, Founding Engineer, Dexterity
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