Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. ThingsBoard

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

Immediate installation on cloud VM

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

Incentivized

• API integration
• users management
• easy to use
• great UI
• Easy to upgrade
• Few configuration task

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

• MicroPython Library not yet available for downlink DATA

near to Zero Conf

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

AWS -> too loud :)

• 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

• TB CE is real production tool
• TB CE is quite the same as TB PE so move to PE is easier