AWS IoT Analytics vs ThingSpeak comparison

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to run and operationalize sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of IoT data without having to worry about the cost and complexity typically required to build an IoT analytics platform. It is the easiest way to run analytics on IoT data and get insights to make better and more accurate decisions for IoT applications and machine learning use cases.

IoT data is highly unstructured which makes it difficult to analyze with traditional analytics and business intelligence tools that are designed to process structured data. IoT data comes from devices that often record fairly noisy processes (such as temperature, motion, or sound). The data from these devices can frequently have significant gaps, corrupted messages, and false readings that must be cleaned up before analysis can occur. Also, IoT data is often only meaningful in the context of additional, third party data inputs. For example, to help farmers determine when to water their crops, vineyard irrigation systems often enrich moisture sensor data with rainfall data from the vineyard, allowing for more efficient water usage while maximizing harvest yield.

AWS IoT Analytics automates each of the difficult steps that are required to analyze data from IoT devices. AWS IoT Analytics filters, transforms, and enriches IoT data before storing it in a time-series data store for analysis. You can setup the service to collect only the data you need from your devices, apply mathematical transforms to process the data, and enrich the data with device-specific metadata such as device type and location before storing the processed data. Then, you can analyze your data by running ad hoc or scheduled queries using the built-in SQL query engine, or perform more complex analytics and machine learning inference. AWS IoT Analytics makes it easy to get started with machine learning by including pre-built models for common IoT use cases.

You can also use your own custom analysis, packaged in a container, to execute on AWS IoT Analytics. AWS IoT Analytics automates the execution of your custom analyses created in Jupyter Notebook or your own tools (such as Matlab, Octave, etc.) to be executed on your schedule.

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that operationalizes analyses and scales automatically to support up to petabytes of IoT data. With AWS IoT Analytics, you can analyze data from millions of devices and build fast, responsive IoT applications without managing hardware or infrastructure.

ThingSpeak is an IoT analytics platform service that allows you to aggregate, visualize and analyze live data streams in the cloud. ThingSpeak provides instant visualizations of data posted by your devices to ThingSpeak. With the ability to execute MATLAB® code in ThingSpeak you can perform online analysis and processing of the data as it comes in. ThingSpeak is often used for prototyping and proof of concept IoT systems that require analytics.