Measured, not claimed
Every number here was measured, with the method published and the other side's strengths shown too. The platform isn't built yet, so today that means its storage layer, timelake. Platform results will appear as we measure them.
Storage: queries right after ingest
TSBS IoT: 500 trucks over 3 days, written in 1,728 five-minute commits to S3 in us-east-2, queried from a laptop over the internet. First run in a fresh process, right after ingest. Measured 2026-10-13.
| System | Seconds per query | Requests per query | $ per million queries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Timelake | 1.5 | 65 | 26 |
| Lance | 3.32.2× | 2,810 | 1,124 |
| Apache Iceberg (PyIceberg appends) | 20.413.6× | 1,522 | 609 |
| Amazon S3 Tables (PyIceberg appends) | 21.614.4× | 1,547 | 619 |
Geometric means over the TSBS IoT queries; cost counts S3 requests at list prices. Full results, including the runs where others catch up after their own compaction: timelake's S3 results and timelake.dev/benchmarks.
What each product includes
As documented by each vendor, checked 2026-10-18. Polythings' column is our plan; the others ship today.
| Polythings (planned) | Azure IoT Hub | AWS IoT Core | ThingsBoard Community | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Available today | No, in design | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Time-series storage and queries | Included, open Iceberg tables | Separate services you route to | Separate services you route to | Included, in its own database |
| Over-the-air updates | Included, with health gates | Separate service, Device Update | Jobs, with an OTA library for FreeRTOS | Included |
| Managed device certificate authority | Included, or bring your own | Public preview, with Device Registry and DPS | Bring your own, or AWS Private CA | Bring your own |
| Assets with time-bound device bindings | Included | Separate services | Separate service, SiteWise | Assets, without time-bound bindings |
| Alarms with acknowledge and shelve | Included, ISA-18.2 lifecycle | Build it with other services | IoT Events ended support in May 2026 | Included |
| Runs on | Our cloud or your account; self-hosted later | Azure | AWS | Anywhere, self-hosted |
Sources: Azure IoT Hub certificate management, its preview status, Azure IoT Hub tiers, Azure IoT Hub pricing and Device Update, AWS IoT Core device provisioning, AWS IoT Core with your own CA, ThingsBoard. Where the others are ahead: they're available now, Azure IoT Hub and AWS IoT Core are proven at very large scale, and ThingsBoard has a large community and dashboards built in.
What we'll measure next
Run with simulated fleets from sensim, including its outages, wrong clocks and late data, and checked by its checker. Configurations will be published with every result.
Ingest
Sustained messages and samples per second, and latency from device to queryable, p50 and p99.
Connections
Concurrent device connections per node, and how the system recovers from reconnect storms.
Correctness
Missing, duplicated and late samples per device, under outages, wrong clocks and backfills.
Updates
Time and bandwidth to update 10,000 devices over unreliable links, and how failures are handled.
Time to first data
Minutes from sign-up to a live chart, for simulated and for real devices.
Cost per device
Per month at 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 devices, against Azure IoT Hub and AWS IoT Core with the services they need for storage, analytics and alarms, and a self-hosted ThingsBoard.