Open Source Internet of Things (IoT) Platforms

If you’re looking to get started with a new idea in IoT, check out these platforms

In the fast-growing IoT space, you have thousands of solution providers, products and services. Alone in the IoT platform world, there are over 620 different IoT platforms globally right now. But not all of these are equally accessible. Most IoT platform services are proprietary and behind a paywall. So what do you do if you want to test if an IoT platform is right for you without an initial investment? What if you want to continue your work after the free trial expires? Or what if you simply want to keep it small at first? Well, you need a free IoT platform.

Below is a brief overview of the main functionalities of the IoT platforms we are considering in this article:

IoT device management

This is already the standard for increased device visibility — at a very basic level, you have a space for connecting, managing, monitoring, and controlling IoT devices. Here you also get various device management tools that provide information on device performance in near real-time and allow for updates of individual devices or whole device fleets from one central location.

IoT development toolchain

This is a recent functionality especially geared towards a good developer experience. Many IoT platforms come with tools for developing and improving IoT apps, some even have an IoT app store with ready-made app templates. IoT development capabilities frequently supplement low-code or no-code platform offerings to ensure maximum freedom to innovate and customize.

IoT data analytics

The data coming from various device fleets matters immensely. Extracting that data and making it available for analysis is the first step towards greater insight. This is why IoT data collection and IoT analytics capabilities are essential to IoT platforms. Ideally, an IoT platform not only increases the visibility of all assets but also supports in harvesting, cleansing & modeling the data, and visualizing the insights. AIoT platforms go one step further in that they also come with advanced analytics capabilities and the possibility to build & run machine learning models.

Security by design

Today, it is standard for most IoT platforms to offer built-in security that may or may not be supplemented with additional software tools.

Resources & a community for developers

To overcome the initial onboarding hurdle and guide users towards self-sufficiency quickly, IoT platforms are expected to offer detailed resources and self-service programs. Along with that, a growing user community will offer help with building and deploying IoT apps or fleet-building.

So here is our list:

Thingspeak

Known as the cloud IoT platform with MATLAB analytics, ThingSpeak allows you to aggregate, analyze, and visualize live data streams. IoT devices send their live data directly to ThingSpeak. From there, you create instant visualizations and can send alerts using web services. Essentially, however, you write and execute MATLAB code to do your data preparation, visualization tasks, and analyses. As a cloud platform, ThingSpeak makes it possible to build IoT projects without the need to develop your own software. Also, you don’t have to set up a server.

Non-commercial users can use ThingSpeak for free. Free accounts stay free but have some limitations when it comes to specific functionalities. Commercial users have the possibility to test the platform in a free version for a limited period. The free IoT platform also offers paid plans for academic, student, and home usage that allow you to send more data and connect more devices.

Blynk

As a hardware-agnostic IoT platform, Blynk.io comes with device management, data analytics, and machine learning functionalities while allowing you to connect to any device. You also have a mobile app constructor that allows you to build IoT apps per drag-and-drop. You get a variety of ready-made widgets to create white-labeled native iOS and Android apps for any use case.

Blynk comes with a free Developer plan intended for personal use. IoT engineers, developers and tinkerers can test the platform and build their own IoT projects. The free version

• allows you to add up to 5 IoT devices for free,
• comes with a selection of free mobile apps for Android and iOS,
• gives you some limited free cloud data storage and libraries to work with the hardware of your choice.

These capacities are enough for a first prototype or for building a first small-scale IoT project. Blynk’s free version is not suitable for commercial use.

Record Evolution Platform

The Record Evolution platform is a cloud service built to facilitate the development of AI solutions for IoT edge devices. The end-to-end hardware-agnostic platform for IoT & AI comes with tools covering the entire IoT development cycle. This includes device management, OTA IoT app development in a cloud IDE and instant deployment plus a data warehousing toolchain. Here, you start from data collection from devices, transformation and modeling all the way to advanced analytics and machine learning.

Designed for collaboration, the simple-to-use interfaces make AI accessible to analysts and engineers. At the same time, it makes IoT implementation tangible to data scientists. The platform serves as an organization-wide decentral hub for organising teams and conducting IoT projects, effectively providing broad IoT enablement within any organisation.

In the free version of the platform, users already have enough resources to build a small-scale IoT project. This can be the first step for startups, freelancers and data enthusiasts. The free plan includes:

• an unlimited number of product collaborators, devices, and IoT apps,
• a free data pod (a compact data warehouse with compute resources sufficient for a small project),
• free app days allowing you to run about two IoT apps on devices for free.

This way, you can connect and manage your IoT devices for free, develop and deploy applications over-the-air.

Once you have switched to a paid plan, the billable assets of the platform are the compute resources (CPU cores, memory, storage, network) required to run data science tasks and the so-called app days, i.e. the time an IoT app is running on an IoT device in development or in production.

Particle.io

Self-describing as a “complete edge-to-cloud platform”, Particle.io also contains all the building blocks for developing an IoT product. This includes connectivity, device management, and even the hardware required to prototype IoT solutions and scale quickly thanks to the robust infrastructure. The platform supports IoT data collection and over-the-air development in a cloud IDE to make developers happy.

Particle has a free Starter plan that includes the basics for every developer such as

• a console for device and fleet management,
• access to the suite of developer tools and firmware libraries,
• standard OTA device updates and diagnostics (device vitals),
• basic cellular data.

The Starter plan comes with the Particle device OS, the platform’s web IDE, the Particle device cloud, and allows users to connect an unlimited number of devices. You can also invite product collaborators and get community support.

Thinger.io

Thinger.io is a free open-source IoT platform. It comes with a readily scalable cloud infrastructure that allows users to easily connect and manage devices from anywhere. Thinger places a great emphasis on the developer experience, focusing on clean designs and easy coding. This is another hardware-agnostic IoT platform so you can connect almost anything you want.

Thinger has a Maker plan that is free and targets developers, students, makers, or private tinkerers working on IoT. The plan includes

• a single developer,
• the possibility to connect up to two devices,
• access to the community cloud,
• the platform’s basic features.

The platform’s basic features entail IoT device management, data buckets, access tokens, dashboards, and endpoints.

As a developer-centric platform, Thinger enjoys a large developer community.

Upswift.io

Upswift.io allows you to manage connected Linux & IoT devices from anywhere, which includes updating, monitoring and controlling at scale. Another hardware-agnostic platform, Upswift prides itself in making it possible to connect any device to the platform in less than 60 seconds and seamlessly grow your fleet to millions of devices. This IoT platform is solely focused on connectivity and device management. So the offering is less extensive than that of its counterparts but is built to be especially robust.

You can test the platform in the free Prototype version. This includes the full-featured Upswift management platform. You have the possibility to

• add up to three devices,
• create up to three device groups,
• invite up to three additional team members.

The functionalities that come with that are remote access and control, OTA updates, remote commands, one processes monitor, plus a data and resources monitor, logs of up to 10 MB monthly, and a map view.

Firebase

Firebase is a service issued by Google for the convenience of application developers to develop their applications. Firebase (BaaS ‘Backend as a Service’) is a solution offered by Google to make it easier for developers to work so that app developers can focus on developing applications without having to make a big effort for backend matters. Firebase has several features, namely:
Google Analytics

Analytics provides data related to user behavior of Android and iOS apps to make it easier for us to make better decisions about products and optimize marketing. View crash data, notification effectiveness, deep link performance, in-app purchase data and more.

Real time database

To transmit and sync data between users and devices in realtime using a cloud-hosted noSQL database.

Authentication

To manage users in an easy and secure way by offering multiple authentication methods, including email/password, third party providers such as Google or Facebook, or directly using an existing account system.
Cloud storage To save and share images, audio, video or other content.

Hosting

Makes static web hosting easy with features built specifically for modern web applications and provides free SSL certificates.

Ubidot

Ubidots is an IoT platform that provides services for free to users with a limit of five sensors and to add a sensor, you have to pay a certain amount of money to remove the sensor limit. Ubidots also provides email and SMS notification services based on triggers created by sensor data according to user requirements.
Ubidots is popular among IoT enthusiasts because its tools are easy to use and already provide various types of connections to development boards on the market. Ubidots has provided a user guide so that users will have no trouble accessing and using Ubidots according to the user’s development board.
Mimin has discussed Ubidots in full and how to use it in the previous article. Read more here, guys. Learn Ubidots Software for IoT Enthusiasts!

You can also watch in more detail an example of the application of ubidoats using the Mappi32 board in the Tutorial on Accessing the Ubidots VEML6075 UV Sensor via the Qwiic Connector.

Antares

ANTARES is present as an Internet of Things (IoT) product and service under the auspices of PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia. ANTARES has 4 main pillars, namely IoT Platform, IoT Connectivity, IoT Solution, and Devices. Antares supports MQTT, HTTP and CoAP protocols.

Antares offers you all the conveniences in developing IoT applications with the following features:
Safe

All communications are transmitted on encrypted lines. Everything is set up to be highly reliable, secure, and robust on top of the Secure Transport Layer.
Reliable

Let us manage your infrastructure 24/7. Focus on the ideas and services you want to build.

Various Devices

Antares supports various devices such as Arduino, ESP, Android, Raspberry Pi, etc. and various programming languages.

Open API

You can not only control your application through the dashboard but also use the provided API.
Antares is also available for free and extra paid with the following facilities:

ThingsBoard

ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for data collection, processing, data visualization, and device management. ThingsBoard enables device connectivity via industry standard IoT protocols — MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP and supports cloud and on-premises deployments. ThingsBoard combines scalability, fault tolerance and performance so you never lose data.

This Thingsboard can be an alternative solution for those of you who are not familiar with programming languages. With just drag and drop we can create an IoT dashboard that will look professional. This thingsboard has two main functions, namely as a broker in IoT terminology (core services) and as a web presentation or data presenter (web UI).

ThingsBoard Architecture

Interested in using ThingsBoard? You can visit thingsboard.io, then click “Try it Now” and register as a user. Start by clicking “Live Demo”, after that select the service we want. There are 2 services available, namely Community Edition (CE) and Professional Edition (PE). CE is a free service aka open source while PE is a paid service. Each has different features and choose according to your needs.

Thinger.io

Thinger.io is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that provides cloud features to connect various internet-connected devices. Thinger.io can also visualize sensor readings in the form of values ​​or graphs.

Tampilan Thinger.io

The menu section on the left side of the page has the following functions:
Statistics

Initial screen at login, where this option displays some information about the number of connected devices, dashboards, data buckets, endpoints, etc.

Dashboards

Interface for users that displays information in various forms of graphics and numbers. The display on the dashboard can be adjusted as needed.

Device

A page that displays the name of the device that is connected or has access to the Thinger.io account that is currently being used. If the device is registered and is online, then the state column will be green with the words connected. While offline, it will be written as disconnected.

Data Buckets or Mass

Virtual storage of server readings over time. The data storage interval value can be set as needed. Saved results can also be exported for offline processing.
Endpoints. The point of entry to a service, process or other.

Access Tokens

Grant authority to third-party services or apps without having to share usernames and passwords. Thinger.io has 5 services with certain features, of course some are free!

Pricing Thinger.io

You can download Thinger.io now on playstore.

Thinger.io apps

Zetta

Zetta is API based IoT platform based on Node.js. It is considered as a complete toolkit to make HTTP APIs for devices. Zetta combines REST APIs, WebSockets to make data-intensive and real-time applications. The following are some notable features.

• It can run on the cloud, or a PC, or even modest development boards.
• Easy interface and necessary programming to control sensors, actuators, and controllers.
• Allows developers to assemble smartphone apps, device apps, and cloud apps.
• It is developed for data-intensive and real-time applications.
• Turns any machine into an API.

OpenRemote

OpenRemote has introduced a new open-source IoT platform to create professional energy management, crowd management, or more generic asset management applications.

Summing up the most important features:

• Generic asset and attribute model with different asset types
• Protocol agents like HTTP REST or MQTT to connect your IoT devices, gateways, or data services or build a missing vendor-specific API.
• Flow editor for data processing, and a WHEN-THEN and a Groovy UI for event-based rules.
• Standard Dashboard for provisioning, automating, controlling, and monitoring your application as well as Web UI components to build project-specific apps.
• Android and iOS consoles which allow you to connect to your phone services, e.g., geofences, and push notifications.
• Edge Gateway solution to connect multiple instances with a central management instance.
• Multi-realms multi-tenant solution, combined with account management and identity service.

Node-RED

Node-RED is a visual tool for lining the Internet of Things, i.e., wiring together hardware devices, APIs, and online services in new ways. Built on Node.js, Node-RED describes itself as “a visual means for wiring the Internet of Things.”

It provides developers to connect devices, services, and APIs using a browser-based flow editor. It can run on Raspberry Pi, and further 60,000 modules are accessible to increase its facilities.

M2MLabs Mainspring

M2MLabs Mainspring is an application framework for developing a machine to machines (M2M) applications such as remote control, fleet administration, or smart terminal. Its facilities include flexible design of devices, device structure, connection between machines and applications, validation and normalization of data, long-term data repository, and data retrieval functions.

It’s based on Java and the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database. M2M applications can be modeled in hours rather than weeks and subsequently passed on to a high-performance execution environment made on top of a standard J2EE server and the highly-scalable Apache Cassandra database.

Kaa IoT Platform

Kaa is a production-ready, flexible, multi-purpose middleware platform for establishing end-to-end IoT solutions, connected applications, and smart devices. It gives a comprehensive way of carrying out effective communication, deals with, and interoperation capabilities in connected and intelligent devices.

It mounts from tiny startups to a great enterprise and holds advanced deployment models for multi-cloud IoT solutions. It is primarily based on flexible microservices and readily conforms to virtually any need and application — some other features as below.

• Facilitates cross-device interoperability.
• Performs real-time device control, remote device provisioning, and structure.
• Create cloud services for smart products
• Consists of topic-based warning systems to provide end-users to deliver messages of any predefined format to subscribed endpoints.
• Perform real-time device monitoring
• Manage an infinite quantity of connected devices
• Collect and analyze sensor data

SiteWhere

SiteWhere platform offers the ingestion, repository, processing, and assimilation of device inputs. It runs on Apache Tomcat and provides highly tuned MongoDB and HBase implementations. You can deploy SiteWhere to cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-premises. It also supports Kubernetes cluster provisioning.

The following are some of the other features.

• Run any estimate of IoT applications on a single SiteWhere instance
• Spring brings the root configuration framework.
• Add widgets through self-registration, REST services, or in batches.
• InfluxDB for event data storage
• Connect devices with MQTT, Stomp, AMQP and other protocols
• Integrates third-party integration frameworks
• Eclipse Californium for CoAP messaging
• HBase for the non-relational datastore
• Grafana to visualize SiteWhere data

More of IoT Cloud platforms

Below is the additional list of IoT Cloud platforms that can be useful to create IoT projects with a brief description:

• Temboo: This is a very interesting platform that provides services to integrate Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other platforms with differnt internet services (like SMS, Email, and so on). This platform uses choreos that are connectors toward external services, so that events in Arduino, like sensor signals, can be transformed in different kind of events. Moreover, it provides some logic like IF-THEN.
• Carriots: This is another interesting plaftorm that enables smart devices to store data. It uses the data stream concept to enable devices to send data. This platform has a rule management system so that you can implement custom logic directly on the web. It can moreover send Email, SMS, and Twitter messages
• NearBus: This proposes a different approach in contrast to other platforms. Usually the basic concept that stands behind IoT platforms is connecting the device (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and so on) to the cloud so that these boards can send data. NearBus provides a different way: it maps the device to the cloud so that it gets a part of the cloud itself. It uses an Agent to accomplish this task and it is possible to control this agent directly from the web using a set of API.
• Ubidots: This platform supports several kinds of boards and can be used to store data in the cloud. It offers data capture, data visualization with a built-in dashboard, and rules management (or event management). With the built-in dashboard, it is possible to see the graph built on the data sent by the device in real time. It supports several kinds of visualization.

ThingWorx

It helps in managing the development lifecycle for IoT applications.

It provides flexibility to access data and IoT from on-premise, off-premise, and from the hybrid environment. Use of ThingWorx will give you increased uptime, reduced costs, role-based visibility & control, and improved compliance.

Features:

• Connect devices.
• Analyze data.
• Build and deploy solutions.
• Industrial IoT and application data is accessible from on-premise web servers, off-premise cloud applications and as hybrid environments.

Cost: Contact them for pricing details.

Verdict: It is a good solution for industrial IoT. With the help of ThingWorx, you can create an industrial IoT application fast. There is no need to write too many lines of code.

Website: ThingWorx

IBM Watson IoT

This platform will help you to capture and investigate the data for devices, machines, equipment and find out the understandings for better decisions.

This platform will allow you to optimize operations and resource. By providing the correct business insights and bidirectional communication facility, it will help in increasing the revenue to a great extent.

Features:

• AI and Analytics.
• Domain expertise.
• Provides flexible solutions.
• Provides security.
• Captures real-time data.
• Provides analytics service as an add-on.

Cost: Starts at $500 per instance/month.

Verdict: Platform provides good features and functionalities at an affordable price.

Website: IBM Watson IoT

#7) Amazon AWS IoT Core

AWS IoT Core will help you to connect devices to the cloud.

It is a managed cloud service. AWS IoT Core will allow devices to connect with the cloud and interact with the other devices and cloud applications. It provides support for HTTP, lightweight communication protocol, and MQTT.

Features:

• It can process a huge amount of messages.
• It is a reliable and secure platform to route the messages to AWS endpoints and other devices.
• Your applications will track and communicate even when not connected.
• You will be able to use other AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon QuickSight etc.
• It allows secure access to your devices.

Cost: Contact for more pricing details. 12 months free trial period is also available.

Verdict: You can start in just three simple steps. Signup, learn from tutorials and start building. Tutorials are provided as a learning material. AWS IoT provides good integration options with other services. The platform is pricey when compared to others.

Website: Amazon AWS IoT Core

Microsoft Azure IoT Suite

This IoT solution is designed for different industry needs. It can be used from manufacturing to transportation to retail. It provides solutions for remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, smart spaces, and connected products.

Features:

• It provides you with an open platform to build a robust application.
• It can be used by beginners as well as experts.
• There are two solutions to start with, as an IoT SaaS and with open source IoT Templates.

Cost: Contact them for pricing details.

Verdict: A free guide is provided on how to create IoT applications. The platform provides a good number of features and functionalities and it is easily scalable too.

Website: Microsoft Azure IoT Suite

Oracle IoT

With the help of Oracle IoT cloud, you can connect your devices to the cloud, perform analysis of data from these devices in real time, and perform integration of data with enterprise applications or web services. It supports integration with Oracle and non-oracle applications and IoT devices using REST API.

Features:

• It will allow you to create an IoT application and connect a device to JavaScript, Android, iOS, Java, and C POSIX.
• It will help you to extend the supply chain, ERP, HR, and customer experience applications.
• Operational efficiency and worker productivity will be improved.
• It provides features like device virtualization, high-speed messaging, and endpoint management to connect.
• To analyze the data, it provides features like stream processing and data enrichment.
• Using REST API, integration can be done with Oracle and non-oracle applications and IoT devices.

Cost: Price starts at $2.2513 OCPU per hour on a monthly basis. These prices are for Universal Credit services. For non-metered services, the prices start at $2500.

Verdict: It is a cloud-based service and is easy to use. It provides an integration option with Oracle and non-Oracle applications.

Website: Oracle IoT

Cisco IoT Cloud Connect

Cisco IoT cloud connect is a mobility cloud-based software suite. This IoT solution is for mobile operators. It will fully optimize and utilize the network. Cisco provides IoT solutions for networking, security, and data management.

Features:

• Granular and real-time visibility.
• It provides updates for every level of the network.
• For IoT security, it provides benefits of protecting the control system from human errors & attacks, increased visibility & control by defending malware and intrusion, and centralized security controls.

Cost: Contact for the pricing details.

Verdict: Cisco IoT cloud connect is for networking, security, and data management and provides updates at every level of the network.

Altair SmartWorks

Altair SmartWorks provides an end-to-end IoT platform. It provides a platform as a service.

It will help you to connect devices, collect data, manage devices and data, and build and run the app. It provides functionalities like device management, Listeners, rules, custom alarms, triggers, and data export etc.

Features:

• Using SmartWorks you can connect with any devices like sensors, gateways, machines, etc.
• Using REST API, you can send XML or JSON data.
• It has an open architecture.

Cost: Free for two devices. For more details contact them.

Verdict: Platform is easy to use and provides good features and functionalities.

Website: SmartWorks

Salesforce IoT Cloud

Salesforce IoT cloud will help you to transform all data which is generated by the customers, partners, devices, and sensors into relevant actions. It has partner connectors like AWS, Cisco Systems, etc.

Features:

• It allows you to test business ideas without programming.
• It will provide you the real data about the product usage and performance.
• It can work with the data from any device.
• You can create device profiles for customer context data in CRM and for streaming data from the connected devices.
• Using RESTful API, you can import data from any source.
• No need of CS degree while creating and managing orchestration rules.
• Real-time traffic view.

Cost: Contact for the pricing details.

Verdict: Tool provides a good interface, ease of use etc. CRM in the cloud will allow people to work from anywhere.

Website: Salesforce IoT Cloud

IRI Voracity

Voracity is a fast, affordable platform for data discovery, integration, migration, governance, and analytics that can transform, report, and anonymize device data streaming through Kafka or MQTT. For example, in huge log files or database tables.

Voracity has a small footprint data manipulation engine for fast aggregation on the edge, plus a full-stack Eclipse IDE for metadata-driven, graphical data integration, and analytics.

Features:

• Connects to and integrates sensor, log, and many other data sources.
• Consolidated (same I/O) data filtering, transformation, cleansing, masking, and reporting.
• Runs on a wide range of Linux, Unix, and Windows platforms, from a Rasberry Pi to a z/Linux mainframe.
• Migrates, replicates, subsets, and otherwise leverages IoT data for archival, data lakes, analytics, and playbooks (E.g. Splunk Phantom).
• Fit-for-purpose data-wrangling node to aggregate and anonymize IoT data and feed IOT mining and machine learning nodes.
• App, add-on, and Universal Forwarder options for fast preparation and direct indexing of Splunk for cloud analytics and action on IoT data.

Cost: 3–5 figures per hostname per year; depending on the components and volumes needed.

Verdict: Very versatile, high-speed data manipulation engine and platform to integrate, govern, and analyze IoT data, on the edge or in the hub.