Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. Portainer

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

Many developers, especially lesser experienced developers, don't have a really good background in setting up containers from the command line. Portainer is invaluable to them. Giving a UI to them gives them much more confidence and allows them to learn properties and capabilities of containers under far less stress. On the flip side of this, giving then a UI on a production system can lead to chaos...never give junior developers access to production servers.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Separating server maintenance with application development, providing a clear user interface for developers who don't want to worry about the underlying server.
• RBAC for container deployment linked to a SAML IDP, not something particularly easy in a native Docker instance but point and shoot in Portainer, allowing the use of Azure / Okta etc to provide user access.
• Image management with multiple repositories is super clear and reduces incidents

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

• When setting up static IPs for a new container, having the used ones for a specific network at hand would be cool or something like a mini IPAM of some sort...
• Using the developertools to see "oh, it's a 40x or 500" when something doesn't seem to load because the ui just states "Didn't work" is kinda annoying. expandable toasts or something would be nice.

Incentivized

It is an excellent tool.

Accessibility for Non-Experts: even with some people having a bit longer on-boarding it is still very simple Quick setup is insanely useful, we can get it running in 10 seconds after installing docker Portainer has once again super clean UI and is very user friendly. Deployment/monitoring and management are super easy. I can tell just from a glance if something is out of date (watching at you Watchtower not doing your job for some reason)

Incentivized

One of their staff members jumped on a video call immediately with me and led me through the problem and solution during a quick session of screen sharing. In this day and age that is above and beyond, especially when it comes to software. It took approximately 5-10 minutes to diagnose and fix, including pleasantries!

It is really easy. Just follow the documentation.

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

Portainer takes the cup in terms of usability and features. It is also more useful for smaller deployments, whereas Kubernetes in our opinion and experience, could probably be more suited to certain other use cases. Portainer is also a fresh feel among all the preexisting container management solutions and brings positivity and a new breeze in the industry.

• 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

• Increased productivity: Portainer's user-friendly interface and streamlined container management can help increase the productivity of IT teams.
• Cost savings: By simplifying container management, Portainer can help reduce the time and resources required to manage container environments, potentially leading to cost savings.

Incentivized