K3s is a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution built for IoT & Edge computing, developed by Rancher Labs, which is now supported by SUSE since the 2020 acquisition. K3s is available free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
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ThingWorx
Score 8.0 out of 10
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ThingWorx is an IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) development platform acquired by PTC in 2014 and merged with Axeda Machine Cloud in the same year, to expand PTC's development offerings.
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Pricing
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes
ThingWorx
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes
ThingWorx
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes
ThingWorx
Features
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes
ThingWorx
Internet of Things
Comparison of Internet of Things features of Product A and Product B
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is well suited for local development. K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is not well suited when you need backward support. In the case that you want to test an application that is still using deprecated APIs or CRDs which are supported on popular managed Cloud Kubernetes Distributions, because K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is trying to be a lightweight application and dropping early support for APIs/CRDs marked for deprication K3s Lightweight Kubernetes will not be a good solution. If you are trying to test Kubernetes etc, functionality, K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is not a good case since it's using Dqlite or SQLite.
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.
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.
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
We have mostly used kind, minikube, and Docker Desktop Kubernetes for local development. Only kind has lower resource requirements, but K3s Lightweight Kubernetes seems to be even lighter. It is a big benefit to be able to deploy a K3s Lightweight Kubernetes cluster in seconds locally in our workstation, there is no cost, and it makes it easy to redeploy from scratch no matter how many times we want. The removal of deprecated APIs or CRDs also makes it more secure since it reduces unnecessarily exposed attack vectors.
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.
