In my view, Blues’ reason for existence (as well as a great future) is described by three keywords: Simple, Secure connection, anywhere, and acceleration time to product. Comparing this to Losant, it seems pretty apparent that Losant does not address any of Blues features and offers an aggregation platform without any support for edge resident, low requirements/high-security data generating sensors. Simply stated, it has no support for what is critical in IoT apps
What am I missing?
Seems like the bigger difference is Blues sells the hardware which is necessary if you want the lovely experience of “it just works”.
I’d say a better comparison/competitor would be Particle, but i found their monthly pricing structure unattractive. With Blues the routing costs are fairly cheap, even at scale, if you’re not sending a ton of data regardless of the number of devices. I found the Blues approach of “price based on routes” much more appropriate for my use-case vs the Particle “price based on device”.
Besides some defective hardware which was quickly replaced, i’ve had no issues with Blues setup and found it very simple/easy for the most part.
Allow me to be more precise, as you created a nice setup for me. I will start with Blues’ motto:
So, my critique of Losant can be rephrased as “Losant does not make cloud-connected products actually possible” - as they do not have the equivalent of the Notecard which is the real enabler by providing hardware interface to the huge collection of existing sensors.
The Particle framework looks like a real competitor, with a serious disadvantage though - they do not have Ray Ozzie to lead them. 