Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. Particle

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 used in mostly all cases in our company. It is best for beginner users and for getting started for IoT Developers. You can give it to any beginner and they can easily learn in just a few minutes. I can say the best product for the starter projects. Everything is just fab!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Particle is simple to use and accessible to any user.
• The servers housed in the data center allow us to respond to any problem
• Through the interface the data is analyzed in a very simple way.
• Ideal interface for the exploitation of our devices, computers and mobile phones.
• The interface for iOTs allows us to interact with the system in a few steps.
• It allows, among other things, the display of information calculated from the data collected from different iOTs, in an understandable way.

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

• For Advanced programs, a bit complicated to programme.
• Pin Limitations (Photon DevKit).
• Pricing is high compared to others.

Incentivized

Efficient integration of multiple devices very well integrated and with a minimum implementation time.

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

I have used other IoT Development Modules like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others. Most of all starter kit doesn't come with WiFi or Cellular built-in. Arduino is a basic module where you have to add WiFi or Cellular manually in it. Raspberry Pi has WiFi but it cannot be used for small or medium use cases, it can be used in advanced and complex systems building and it is costlier.

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

• It ensures very good results, with recovery of the investment in a short time.

Incentivized