A:The core difference is how you're billed for the product. 

  • When subscribing thru Marketplace, everything is governed by Microsoft's billing.  Your billing plans are specified on Marketplace portal.  If you monitor more resources than allowed in the plan, your monitoring will be paused.  If you monitor less resources than in the plan, you're overpaying. Basically, Marketplace cannot support metered billing.  However, you pay to Microsoft and generally avoid the hassle of getting approval/accounting setup for 3rd party products/vendors 
  • When subscribing directly, CloudMonix team governs your subscription, can provide trial extensions, invoice billing, and your bill will reflect actual utilization (CloudMonix tracks monitoring usage by actual resource-hours consumed)


Furthermore, if you sign up thru Marketplace, you can login to CloudMonix thru Azure Portal (CloudMonix becomes one of the Azure resources in your portal, like a VM).  However, you can also access your CloudMonix account directly and invite other users from your organization to see/manage it.

When subscribing directly, you can only login to CloudMonix thru CloudMonix website.


Examples of pricing tiers in the Azure Marketplace is included.  As an example, customers who need to monitor 40 resources, will end up paying for 50, because a "40 resource plan" does not exist. (Side note: we originally requested many more granular pricing plans to be in the Marketplace, however, Microsoft's infrastructure was unable to handle the larger number of plans)