Crestron XiO vs. Microsoft Azure IoT Central

XiO is definitely well suited for applications like ours where we have a large number of devices to manage. I like being able to see all my devices and locations in one place. It is very helpful to see if any devices are offline each morning and be able to troubleshoot before any customers realize there is a problem

Incentivized

Microsoft Azure IoT Central has native integrations with Visual Studio (like pretty much all Microsoft products) making it pretty simple to publish apps to Azure App Service, where you can host all sorts of different applications. It does a really good job of storing large amounts of data (for instance, collected from IoT devices with various sensors) and it gets stored to multiple DBs. Azure IoT Central could improve by adding more customizations, as this would make troubleshooting the products easier and make future costs smaller and easier to predict.

Incentivized

• Scheduled re-boots and updates
• I like the way the hierarchy can be set up
• individually customizable group settings within the hierarchy
• I like the capability of setting up background images for brand promotion or employee information

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Support
• Good and approachable GUI
• Many types of subscription configurations

Incentivized

• I would like the option to choose IP addresses as one of the viewable columns when looking at/sorting through all your available devices.
• It would be nice to be able to link the IP address listed directly to their devices.
• Sometime trying to reboot a device in XiO does not work for me and I need to go directly to the device's admin page.

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

XiO is a necessity when managing the large number of device our company has

Incentivized

Before deciding to go with Microsoft Azure IoT Central, we considered Google, Datadog, and AWS alternatives. The reason we went with Azure was that the client was heavily invested in Microsoft technologies and Azure plays really well with other Microsoft products. The competitive products might be a little bit easier to set up, with more flexible pricing, but, the integrations with other Microsoft services were the deciding factor for our use case.

Incentivized

• being able to manage all my devices remotely saves us time/money
• XiO reduces the need to have someone on-site/in person to manage my devices

Incentivized

• positive: connected huge number of machines as IoT devices and passed them through entire IoT pipeline until storage in a fairly short time
• negative: we spent some time figuring out some "less-used" services because they aren't documented well

Incentivized