PoE vs PoE+: what's the actual difference?

Both PoE and PoE+ deliver power and data over a single Ethernet cable, so a network encoder or decoder needs no separate power supply — just one cable to the switch. The difference between them is simply how much power that cable can carry, which determines what kind of device can run on it.

In practice: a simple audio bridge or a low-power NDI decoder will run comfortably on standard PoE. Devices doing more — encoding, decoding 4K, or running additional onboard processing — often need the extra headroom PoE+ provides, and won't power up reliably (or at all) on a standard PoE port.

The practical risk runs in one direction: plugging a PoE+ device into an older switch that only supplies standard PoE typically means the device simply won't power on, rather than running in some degraded mode. Worth checking your switch's PoE budget per port before standardising on a PoE+ device across a multi-unit deployment, since switches also have a total PoE power budget across all ports combined.