AWS IoT Core vs Azure IoT Hub vs Google Cloud IoT: An Honest Comparison

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At some point in every IoT project, you have to pick a cloud platform. And once you're in, switching is painful.

AWS, Azure, and Google are the three names that come up every time. They all connect devices. They all handle telemetry at scale. They all have dashboards, SDKs, and documentation that stretches to the horizon. So how do you actually choose?

The Short Version

Each platform has a distinct personality — and the right choice depends almost entirely on what you're already running and what you care about most.

AWS IoT Core — the most flexible, the most powerful, and the most complex. A "bring your own architecture" experience with the largest portfolio of IoT services: Core, Greengrass, SiteWise, TwinMaker, FleetWise, Device Defender. If you want to compose exactly the system you need from low-level primitives, AWS lets you. The trade-off: no cohesive out-of-the-box workflow. You glue it together yourself.

Azure IoT Hub — the enterprise integration champion. If your org runs Microsoft 365, Azure AD, or Dynamics 365, the integrations that cost you engineering weeks on AWS come out of the box here. Device provisioning via DPS, Device Twins, OTA updates, and Azure Digital Twins are the most mature in the market. Steep naming confusion (Hub vs Central vs Edge vs Sphere vs Operations), but unmatched for industrial and enterprise deployments.

Google Cloud IoT — the analytics powerhouse, with a catch. Google discontinued IoT Core in 2023, so there's no managed device broker anymore. What remains is exceptional: BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Vertex AI, and a data pipeline that's hard to beat for analytics-heavy workloads. But you're assembling the connectivity layer yourself now.

The one-line summary:

  • AWS → maximum flexibility, composable architecture, edge strength
  • Azure → enterprise integration, device management, digital twins
  • Google → data analytics and ML, but requires more setup

💡 How to Actually Decide

Stop comparing feature lists. Answer three questions instead:

  1. What cloud does your organization already run?
  2. Is your primary pain device management at scale, or data analytics?
  3. Do you need edge processing, and how constrained are your devices?

The honest answer for most teams: you already know which one wins before you finish the comparison.

→ Full breakdown with per-category scoring, pricing notes, and a decision framework: Read the deep dive

Follow for more IoT architecture deep dives — part of my ongoing 101-story series. 🔬

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