Many times this question arise that to simplify some of these following problems to take plc to next level.
Yes, for basic requirements the consumer has to pay a lot more than aspectd for the plc hardware. Also every diffrent plc companies have fixed different plc communication ports i.e Ethernet, RS-232, RS-485, or RS-422 etc.
So a need rises for a common communication port for plc’s to computer beacause sometimes problems are created when we have laptops and then with no option left we have to use converters to communicate with plc.
It is also possible sometimes to replace plc with development boards such as raspberry pi but not everytime due to the diffrent programming languages as the plc mostly uses ladder logic where as the raspberrry pi is based on Python, C, C++.
Mihir's Blogpost 