How AWS IoT Device Management and Mender differ on target hardware, rollback, deployment and cost.
| AWS IoT Device Management | Mender | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Cloud service | Linux OTA |
| Targets | Any (device-agnostic) | Embedded Linux |
| Deployment | SaaS (AWS) | SaaS + self-hosted |
| Rollback | Job abort criteria; rollback is your job document’s responsibility | A/B partitions with automatic rollback on failed boot |
| How it works | Not an OTA product but a set of pieces: Jobs delivers instructions to device groups, Fleet Indexing finds targets, Code Signing signs artifacts, and the device agent you write does the actual updating. Rollout controls and abort thresholds are good; the update logic is yours. | Writes the new root filesystem to the inactive partition, reboots into it, and rolls back automatically if the device fails to check in. Delta updates and phased rollouts sit in the paid tiers; the update mechanism itself is open source and self-hostable. |
| Pricing* | Pay per use, no minimum | OSS free; hosted from $34/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Device SDKs (Apache-2.0) | Apache-2.0 (client + server) |
| Best for | Fleets already living inside AWS | Linux fleets that must never brick |
Choose AWS IoT Device Management for fleets already living inside aws. Choose Mender for linux fleets that must never brick.
* Published list pricing (vendor pricing pages, August 2026).