Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. ThingWorx

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

ThingWorx is great if you want to create an MES-like solution for your company, but have data coming not only from the plant floor, but also from databases, azure, and others. You can seamlessly integrate those data and create reports like visuals and mashups. It is also a great solution if you have multiple plants and need to monitor everyone simultaneously and even compare results between locations. ThingWorx is not recommended if all you need is a BI solution, it is not a reporting software and it should not be used as it.

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

• Quick monitoring of extraordinary behaviour of a monitored component
• As the Kepware tools and libraries have become more integrated, the platform has an unrivalled set of interface solutions.
• Modelling is simple enough to explain to non-specialists but very powerful in its expression.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The MQTT interface needs improvement, its crashed during development of new entities on a frequent basis.
• The standard time series and trend tools are very basic and dont compare well with Top-end historians but its possible with some relative easy interfacing to use 3rd party applications.
• Care, forethought and experience is required when building complex applications, it's difficult to delete entities once the network becomes large and complex. N+Maintaining synchronicity between multiple dev and productions systems has to be carefully managed.

Incentivized

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

Azure and Oracle IoT and Thingworx all provide very good support and very easy analytics when it comes to data streams. ThingWorx and Azure both have very good security and provide a robust set of capabilities. However, ThingWorx's main advantage is its built-in templates for custom apps that are industry-agnostic unlike many of its peers.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The use of ThingWorx as a near-complete, full-stack industry 4.0 solution has been at the forefront of recent and ongoing research.