The ESP8266 is a very user friendly and low cost device to provide internet connectivity to your projects. The module can work both as a Access point (can create hotspot) and as a station (can connect to Wi-Fi), hence it can easily fetch data and upload it to the internet making Internet of Things as easy as possible. It can also fetch data from internet using API’s hence your project could access any information that is available in the internet, thus making it smarter. Another exciting feature of this module is that it can be programmed using the Arduino IDE which makes it a lot more user friendly. However this version of the module has only 2 GPIO pins (you can hack it to use upto 4) so you have to use it along with another microcontroller like Arduino, else you can look onto the more standalone ESP-12 or ESP-32versions. So if you are looking for a module to get started with IOT or to provide internet connectivity to your project then this module is the right choice for you.