Google Cloud IoT vs. Microsoft Azure IoT Central

I consider myself very techy and found Google Cloud IoT platform very challenging to manage. The lack of tutorials and discussions to understand how each section works is very challenging. I specifically made a connection after several hours to Google Nest to third-party integration, Home Assistant. Shortly after Google Cloud upgraded to a new version breaking the connection. This was extremely frustrating. No service should take several hours to figure out, in my opinion, if it does, the platform is doing a poor job of making it easy. I'm personally very discouraged any time I ever have to use this platform. It's very hard to find answers.

Incentivized

If there is a need for a system to be developed in a short time then Azure IoT Central is the perfect option, offering a fast solution for a simple system that can be used and built upon. This is a great advantage as it skips on some details, also this is a bit of a disadvantage as most times developers want to know what they are working with.

Incentivized

• Integration with different brands of microcontrollers including the one currently used by Espresiff.
• The platform is very robust and secure.

Incentivized

• Creation and management of user roles, who can access your IoT resources and configure the level of access, very granular and self-explanatory
• Configuration of apps and devices, integrations, and administrations are done in an intuitive way and it's easy to navigate your way through the available settings.
• The documentation is really excellent, everything is explained succinctly and there are enough practical examples to get you started.
• Existing templates can save you a lot of time in getting your desired setup complete with less effort and time invested.

Incentivized

• Not beginner friendly.
• Needs more tutorials and walk throughs on how to get started.
• Very complicated and unless you know what you are doing you will be lost.
• Lack of material found on how to do each section / services.

Incentivized

• Lack of info on error messages
• GUI misses important configuration options
• Not well documented options inside IoT Hub for example (consumer groups)

Incentivized

Although comparisons are hateful, even more so when we are talking about leading brands where the quality of their services are indisputable, the general environment of Google was more familiar to me since I use, for example, Google Firebase on a daily basis, where part of the concepts are similar, without Without a doubt, AWS services are excellent, but it was easier for me to go through the functions of Google Cloud IoT.

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

• The amount of hours to get things integrated is negative.
• The amount of hours researching how to get devices integrated is negative.
• Overall the amount of time and effort getting things working has been a negative experience.

Incentivized

• Continuous and significant progress
• Integration of the product in the ongoing work and improvement of our system capacity
• Convenient interface

Incentivized