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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Microsoft Azure

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    Xamarin

    Score6 out of 10
    N/AN/AN/A
    Pricing
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Editions & Modules
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    Xamarin
    Free
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Microsoft Azure and Xamarin
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Xamarin
    -
    Ratings
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.126 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling8.725 Ratings00 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing8.624 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates8.225 Ratings00 Ratings
    Monitoring tools8.326 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images8.424 Ratings00 Ratings
    Operating system support8.926 Ratings00 Ratings
    Security controls8.626 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation8.224 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    Swiftify
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Android Studio
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    Swiftify
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    7.0
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Availability
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Microsoft AzureXamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
    • The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
    • Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
    • iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
    • Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Saves development time and deliver fast.
    • Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
    • Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots