Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. Microsoft Azure IoT Hub

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

We are using the Azure IOT hub for solving the multitenancy problem within our research project. We are consuming data from various resources and communicating it with different devices on our hybrid cloud. We also use Azure IoT as a bridge between two business Intelligence sources which are really hard to connect devices.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Massive registration and deployment of new devices.
• Easy integration with other Azure services.
• Handling security if devices.

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

• Hardware and embedded integration could improve or be at parity with competitor.
• Pricing model not as flexible as competitor.

Incentivized

Azure IoT support professionals are strong, and always provide timely responses. Vast documentation and examples are available, plus a network of professionals in the market. It's very comparable to the main competitor offer, and easily integrated into the main Azure product offer. Azure IoT is not a new solution, so it is very mature and support can easily address any day to day or architectural concern you have.

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

We require Azure integration, data security and simple development. IoT Hub ticked all those boxes.

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

• As a student, we are using student program subscription which is cheaper than an individual or business subscription.
• Our school devices our efficiently communicating with each other which has increased the revenue of our school.
• It provides strong and robust cloud communication within the premises which also helped in increased in the school reputation.

Incentivized