In this paper is presented a comparative study between a system designed and implemented for monitoring toxic emissions resulting from industrial processing of leather and other existing systems. The system consists of sensors, data acquisition boards, industrial Ethernet connection, a process computer, and a specially designed software application which runs on the process computer. The system is compared with other systems taking into consideration specific criteria and the advantages and the disadvantages of each approach are presented. The first criterion is the communication between the data acquisition boards and the process computer which can be by cable or wireless. The second criterion is the process computer failure; in this case are analyzed different approaches which will prevent the loss of data collected from sensors by data acquisition boards and not received by the process computer while it failed. The third criterion represents the autonomy of data acquisition boards; here are analyzed the cases when they are running on batteries, when are connected to the electrical network, and both cases together. The final criterion represents the number of sensors and process computers; in this case is investigated the possibility of using a cluster of process computers in order to connect as many sensors as required. The results of this study are used to set the path for future improvements on our system.