MQTT

[update in progress…]

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When do we use MQTT over the Particle Cloud?

The most likely reason would be cost. Photons are wonderful devices with an equally great supporting infrastructure in the form of the Particle cloud server and associated utilities. The Photon is almost a turnkey solution for experimenting with the IoT.

MQTT is also an open standard like the Particle platform, but requires just a bit more effort to set up the server portion of the ecosystem.

Both MQTT and Particle cloud options are accessible through IoTa / node-RED, MQTT support is built into node-RED, while Particle devices can be interfaced with using my node-red-contrib-particle nodes.

If you are comfortable with setting up servers, MQTT gives far more flexibility in deciding how you want your server set up and removing the reliance on a third party web service (the Particle Cloud). Otherwise, Particle provides a quick entry into the world of the IoT.