Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. ThingWorx

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

It is well suited for situations where you require an end-to-end platform for pushing code and managing data and security of the IoT application. However, it is not well suited for the case when you want to scale the app up to many users and this requires more from the part of the product.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Asset Monitoring - quick and easy to deploy, can connect to the plant floor and get real-time data from devices.
• Analytics - The TWX Analytics extension has a variety of analyses that can be done into any data source input into TWX.
• Alerts notification - you can program alerts to be sent via email/SMS seamlessly.

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

• Advanced functionality in control and data visualization often requires additional coding from the user.
• Support and tutorials provided are often lacking in detail or are not readily transferable.
• Mashup development works poorly on small monitors or laptops.

We started more than a year ago and do not plan to replace it

Incentivized

Experienced and knowledgeable customer support executives, Thingworx is a very large product and contains a myriad of features which is not easy to remember without enough training or hands-on experience

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

Well-suited - multiple streams from many data sources, highly scalable application scenarios.Good for a quick test of internet of things (IoT) connectivity and for deploying access via the web. Smooth deployment, easy to couple to devices. Easy cooperation with Splunk, which we use also.

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

• Good for quick deployment of customer specific control of IoT
• Good for quick test of IoT platform
• Difficult to debug complicate system

Incentivized