The story behind node-opcua
node-opcua started in 2014 inside a nuclear engineering facility. Twelve years later it's used in production at Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Siemens, and hundreds of industrial deployments worldwide.
How it started
Etienne Rossignon was working at Areva, immersed in CAD/CAM, metrology, and machine-to-machine communication, when he encountered OPC UA — an emerging standard for secure, cross-platform industrial data exchange. Faced with a critical project and the need to master the spec fast, he decided to build a full SDK from scratch in JavaScript.
The choice of JavaScript was deliberate: Node.js's asynchronous event loop is a natural fit for OPC UA's subscription-and-notification model — many concurrent sessions per process, no thread management. At the time, industrial software was dominated by C/C++ and Java. Etienne bet that the developer velocity and ecosystem of Node.js would make OPC UA accessible to a far wider audience.
He published the first commit on GitHub in 2014. The project was MIT-licensed from day one.
How it grew
Downloads have grown more than 20× since 2020, from a few thousand a month to over 500,000. The stack has been in continuous development for twelve years — over 3,000 tests, roughly 97% code coverage, and production deployments on every major operating system.
node-opcua became the OPC UA implementation embedded in Node-RED, the low-code programming tool from the OpenJS Foundation. It's used inside AWS IoT Greengrass, and has been adopted by companies and universities including Siemens, Valmet, Capgemini, Litmus, Tulip, BrainCube, MIT, and the Technical University of Munich.
Sterfive — the company behind the stack
In 2017 Etienne founded Sterfive, a French company dedicated to sustaining node-opcua and providing commercial services around it: support contracts, consulting, custom OPC UA development, and a family of commercial add-on modules (GDS, PubSub, Modeler, OPC UA for Node-RED, and more).
Sterfive exclusively funds its open-source R&D through its customers. The technology evolves directly with industry needs — no VC, no ads, no telemetry. The company is a Corporate Member of the OPC Foundation and a UMATI partner.
Open-source DNA
Sterfive's open-source commitment extends beyond maintaining node-opcua. As part of its contracted engagements, the company regularly contributes production-grade code to third-party open-source projects in the industrial IoT ecosystem — including Eclipse node-wot and upstream dependencies it relies on. When a client project uncovers a bug in an external library, Sterfive fixes it at the source and pushes the contribution upstream.
License
The core node-opcua SDK is released under the MIT license. Commercial modules with extended functionality are available through Sterfive.