How Golioth and ESP RainMaker differ on target hardware, rollback, deployment and cost.
| Golioth | ESP RainMaker | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | MCU cloud | Vendor platform |
| Targets | MCU (Zephyr-first) | ESP32 family |
| Deployment | SaaS | SaaS (Espressif) or self-hosted on AWS |
| Rollback | Manual release targeting; rollback by publishing a prior artifact | OTA partition scheme with rollback support in ESP-IDF |
| How it works | One consumption meter instead of plans: $0.25 per connected device per month, $0.0095 per megabyte of OTA traffic, and separate rates for logs and streaming data. Every account gets the same features, which makes small fleets cheap and makes cost forecasting arithmetic rather than negotiation. | A device cloud built around ESP-IDF: claiming, provisioning, phone apps, voice assistants and OTA, all supplied by the chip vendor. ESP-IDF’s own OTA partition scheme handles the rollback, and the whole stack can be deployed into your own AWS account. |
| Pricing* | $50 free credits; $0.25/device/mo + $0.0095/MB | Free for development; commercial by agreement |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Device SDK (Apache-2.0) | Firmware + apps (Apache-2.0) |
| Best for | Zephyr projects that want predictable unit cost | Products built on ESP32 silicon |
Choose Golioth for zephyr projects that want predictable unit cost. Choose ESP RainMaker for products built on esp32 silicon.
* Published list pricing (vendor pricing pages, August 2026).