Google Cloud IoT vs. Microsoft Azure IoT Central

I consider myself very techy and found Google Cloud IoT platform very challenging to manage. The lack of tutorials and discussions to understand how each section works is very challenging. I specifically made a connection after several hours to Google Nest to third-party integration, Home Assistant. Shortly after Google Cloud upgraded to a new version breaking the connection. This was extremely frustrating. No service should take several hours to figure out, in my opinion, if it does, the platform is doing a poor job of making it easy. I'm personally very discouraged any time I ever have to use this platform. It's very hard to find answers.

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

• Integration with different brands of microcontrollers including the one currently used by Espresiff.
• The platform is very robust and secure.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Not beginner friendly.
• Needs more tutorials and walk throughs on how to get started.
• Very complicated and unless you know what you are doing you will be lost.
• Lack of material found on how to do each section / services.

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

Although comparisons are hateful, even more so when we are talking about leading brands where the quality of their services are indisputable, the general environment of Google was more familiar to me since I use, for example, Google Firebase on a daily basis, where part of the concepts are similar, without Without a doubt, AWS services are excellent, but it was easier for me to go through the functions of Google Cloud IoT.

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

• The amount of hours to get things integrated is negative.
• The amount of hours researching how to get devices integrated is negative.
• Overall the amount of time and effort getting things working has been a negative experience.

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