The Internet of Things (IoT) is the future of technology that helps the Artificial intelligence (AI) to control and understand the things in a much better way. We have gathered some best known IoT platforms those helps you to develop the IoT projects in a controlled way.
What do you mean by IoT platforms?
The IoT platforms are suites of components those help to setup and manage the internet connected devices. A person can remotely collect data, monitor and manage all internet connected devices from a single system. There are a bunch of IoT platforms available online but building an IoT solution for a company is all depend on IoT platform host and support quality.
Here, we have compiled some best and well-known Open source Internet of things (IoT) platforms. Most of these platforms provide API to support the Linux hacker board such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and BeagleBone.
Top Open source IoT Platforms
Kaa IoT Platform
It is the feature-rich open and efficient Internet of Things cloud platform. Any IoT company, IoT system integrator, or individual has a free way to materialize their smart product concepts. Kaa enables data management for connected objects and your back-end infrastructure by providing the server and endpoint SDK components.
Kaa key IoT features:
- Manage an unlimited number of connected devices
- Set up cross-device interoperability
- Perform A/B service testing
- Perform real-time device monitoring
- Perform remote device provisioning and configuration
- Collect and analyze sensor data
- Analyze user behavior deliver targeted notifications
- Create cloud services for smart products
SiteWhere: Open Platform for the Internet of Things
It is another Open source IoT platform that provides the ingestion, storage, processing, and integration of device data. The SiteWhere runs on the core servers provided by the Apache Tomcat. It offers highly tuned MongoDB and HBase implementations. It can easily integrate with hackers boards.
Image Source: Opensourceforu
SiteWhere key IoT features:
- Run any number of IoT applications on a single SiteWhere instance
- Spring delivers the core configuration framework
- Connect devices with MQTT, AMQP, Stomp, and other protocols
- Add devices through self-registration, REST services, or in batches
- Integrates with third-party integration frameworks such as Mule AnyPoint
- Default database storage is MongoDB
- Eclipse Californium for CoAP messaging
- InfluxDB for event data storage
- Grafana to visualize SiteWhere data
- HBase for non-relational data store
- And more…
ThingSpeak: An open IoT platform with MATLAB analytics
ThingSpeak is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that lets you analyze and visualize the data in MATLAB without buying a license from Mathworks. IT allows you to collect and store sensor data in the cloud and develop IoT applications. It works with Arduino, Particle Photon and Electron, ESP8266 Wifi Module, BeagleBone Black, Raspberry Pi, Mobile and web apps, Twitter, Twilio, and MATLAB to end the sensor data to ThingSpeak. The ThingSpeak is mostly focused on sensor logging, location tracking, triggers and alerts, and analysis
ThingSpeak Open source IoT Platform key IoT Features
- Collect data in private channels
- Share data with public channels
- RESTful and MQTT APIs
- MATLAB analytics and visualizations
- Alerts
- Event scheduling
- App integrations
- Worldwide community
DeviceHive: IoT Made Easy
DeviceHive is another feature rich Open source IoT platform which distributed under Apache 2.0 license. The DeviceHive is free to use and change. It provides Docker and Kubernetes deployment options. You can download and use it with both public and private cloud and also can scale form a single virtual machine to the enterprise-grade cluster. It has the ability to connect to any device or hacker board via REST API, WebSockets or MQTT. You can even connect such low-end wi-fi enabled devices as ESP8266.
DeviceHive Open source IoT platform key features:
- Directly integrate with Alexa
- Visualization dashboard of your choice
- Customize DeviceHive behavior by running your custom javascript code.
- It supports the Big data solutions such as ElasticSearch, Apache Spark, Cassandra and Kafka for real-time and batch processing.
- Connect any device via REST API, WebSockets or MQTT.
- It comes with Apache Spark and Spark Streaming support.
- Supports libraries written in various programming languages, including Android and iOS libraries
- It allows running batch analytics and machine learning on top of your device data.
- And More…
Mainflux
The Mainflux is the internet of things platform which is an Open source and patent free. The user can deploy it on its own premises or in the cloud. Mainflux IoT platform written in Go and deployed in Docker.
- Responsive and scalable architecture based on a set of microservices
- Set of clean APIs: HTTP RESTful, MQTT, WebSocket and CoAP
- SDK – set of client libraries for many HW platforms in several programming languages: C/C++, JavaScript, Go and Python
- Device management and provisioning and OTA FW updates
- Highly secured connections via TLS and DTLS
- Enhanced and fine-grained security via deployment-ready Mainflux Authentication and Authorization Server with Access Control scheme based on customizable API keys and scoped JWT
- Deployment and scalability via Docker images.
- Clear project roadmap, extensive development ecosystem, and highly skilled developer community
Zetta: API-First Internet of Things Platform
Zetta is a server-oriented open source IoT platform built on Node.js. Zetta combines REST APIs, WebSockets, and reactive programming. It can run on single board computer, PC or cloud and has the ability to link different platforms such as Linux, BeagleBones, Raspberry Pis, Arduino hacker boards, and PCs together with cloud platforms like Heroku to create geo-distributed networks. You can also stream data into machine analytics platforms like Splunk.
Zetta Open source IoT platform key features:
- Built around Node.js, REST, WebSockets, and a flow-based “reactive programming”.
- Supports wide range of hacker boards
- Zetta allows you to assemble smartphone apps, device apps, and cloud apps
DSA: Open Source Platform & “Toolkit” for Internet Of Things Devices
Distributed Services Architecture (DSA) is an opensource IoT platform that unifies the separate devices, services, and applications in the structured and real-time data model. It facilitates decentralized device inter-communication, logic, and applications. The DSA community building a library Distributed Service Links which allow protocol translation and data integration to and from 3rd party data-sources. All DSA modules are lightweight, making it possible to couple the DSBroker, multiple DSLinks and client web-applications on the same low powered device such as a Raspberry PI, Beaglebone black or any other similar computing platform. This Open Source IoT Platform built on NodeAPI, DSLink, and DSBroker. The community of DSA planning to provide support for Analytics for 3rd party processing systems are R Project, RDBMS, JDBC SQL passthrough and prepared statements, Haystack DSLink, Niagara DSLink, OS X DSLink, Windows DSLink and nix DSLink
DSA Open source IoT platform key features:
- Dictate M2M authorization lifecycle
- Expose WebSocket / HTTP endpoint for subscribing to node and value changes from the broker
- Implement DSA Query DSL
- Hardware integration support: Dreamplug, Beaglebone, Raspberry PI, Android DSLink, OS X DSLink, Windows DSLink, and nix DSLink
- The platform built on three
- Lightweight Modules
Thingsboard.io Open-source IoT Platform
Thingsboard is a 100% Open source IoT platform and can host it as a SaaS or PaaS solution. IT provides device management, data collection, processing and visualization for your IoT projects. The standard protocols it supports for providing device connectivity are MQTT, CoAP and HTTP and supports both cloud and on-premises deployments. It gives more than 30 customizable widgets allows you to build end-user custom dashboards for most IoT use-cases.
thingsboard.io open source IoT platform key features:
- Real-time data visualization and remote device control
- 30 customizable widgets for custom dashboard
- customizable rules, plugins, widgets and transport implementations
- Allows monitoring client-side and provision server-side device attributes.
- Support multi-tenant installations out-of-the-box.
- Supports transport encryption for both MQTT and HTTP(s) protocols.
- Failed nodes can be replaced without downtime.
- And more…
Thinger.io: The Opensource Platform for Internet of things
The Thinger.io is an opensource platform for IoT which provides a scalable cloud infrastructure for connecting devices or things. You can control them easily by using the admin console or integrate them in your project logic with using their REST API. IT support all types of hackers board such as Arduino, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison.
Thinger.io open source IoT platform key features:
- Real-time dashboards
- Docker and IFTT integration
- Cloud ready
- Install the server in your own cloud and use the Open Source libraries for connecting your devices.
WSo2- Open source platform for Internet of Things and mobile projects
WSo2 Build allows exposing an API to power a mobile app allowing users to monitor and control their devices. You can integrate it with your existing identity system, or use theirs. This IoT platform also out of the box supports almost all known hackers board devices such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino Uno, etc. The edge computing is powered WSO2 Siddhi.
Supported protocols for device communication are MQTT, HTTP, Websockets and XMPP protocols with IoT Server Framework extension for adding more protocols and data formats.
ALSO SEE:
WSo2 open source IoT platform key features:
- Through WSO2 Data analytics server (DAS) it supports batch, interactive, real-time and predictive analytics.
- Location-based services (Geo-fencing) and alerting as a reusable functionality
- MQTT, HTTP, Websockets and XMPP protocols
- Provision/de-provision apps to multiple enrolled devices
- Implement self-service device enrollment and management for iOS, Android, and Windows devices
- Distribute and manage applications/firmware of devices
- Group, manage and monitor connected devices
- API driven device type definition
- View instant, visualized statistics of individual or multiple devices
- Stats-API to write your own visualization
- Pre-built graphs for common sensors
- And More…
Open source IoT Platform Comparison Table
| IoT Software Platform | Device management? | Integration | Security | Protocols for data collection | Analytics | Support for visualizations? | DB |
| Kaa IoT Platform | Yes | Portable SDK available to integate any particular platfrom, REST API | Link Encryption (SSL), RSA key 2048 bits, AES key 256 bits | MQTT, CoAP, XMPP, TCP, HTTP | Real time IoT Data Analytics and Visualization with Kaa, Apache Cassandra and Apache Zappelin | Yes | MongoDB, Cassandra, Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL |
| SiteWhere | Yes | REST API, Mule AnyPoint, and more | Link Encryption (SSL), Spring Security | MQTT, AMQP, Stomp, WebSockets, and direct socket connections | Real-time analytics (Apache Spark) | No | MongoDB, HBase , InfluxDB |
| ThingSpeak | No | REST and MQTT APIs | Basic Authentication | HTTP | MATLAB Analytics | No | MySQL |
| DeviceHive | *Unknown | REST AP, MQTT APIs | Basic Authentication using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) | REST API, WebSockets or MQTT | Real-time analytics (Apache Spark) | Yes | PostgreSQL ,SAP Hana DB |
| Zetta | No | REST APIs | Basic Authentication | HTTP | Using Splunk | No | Unknown |
| Distributed Services Architecture (DSA) | NO | REST APIs | Basic Authentication | HTTP | No | No | ETSDB – Embedded Time Series |
| Thingsboard.io | Yes | REST APIs | Basic Authentication | MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP | Real time analytics(Apache Spark, Kafka) | No | Cassandra |
| Thinger.io | Yes | REST APIs | Link Encryption (SSL/TLS) and basic authentication | MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP | Yes | No | MongodB |
| WSo2 | Yes | REST APIs | Link Encryption (SSL) and basic authentication | HTTP, WSO2 ESB, MQTT | Yes, WSO2 Data Analytics Server | Yes | Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MS SQL |
| Mainflux | Yes | REST APIs | JWT encrypted and signed tokens, OAuth2.0, public key infrastructure (PKI) and client-side certificates | HTTP, MQTT, WebSocket, CoAP) | Yes (integrated) Platform not confirmed | Yes | Cassandra, MongoDB or InfluxDB or PostgreSQL |
*Unknown means we are not able to find that.
Note: All the information mentioned in the Opensource IOT platform comparison table taken from the internet from the respective IoT platform website. If there is something wrong or missing please let us know to change or add that.
While researching for these IoT platforms we also got the one that we think should be mentioned in this article and here it is:
IoTgo IndieGoGo
IoTgo is an open source IoT platform, like WordPress, ZenCart and all other open source software, you can deploy your own IoTgo cloud platform.
Thanks it really helpful….
ThingsBoard supports Data Visualization. This is one of the main features of the platform. It also supports other databases: HSQLDB (for development) and PostgreSQL, Cassandra (for production).
Have you considered freeboard.io? Great dashboard tool, with a free and open source option.
I would also suggest you to check out http://thinx.cloud
THiNX Cloud open-source IoT platform goes to the roots of IoT 🙂
You may look WAZIUP.io platform. This is an open source platform
Great article! Mainflux is missing in the comparison table though.
Really helpful to see this comparison of the different platforms that are out there. You discussed Mainflux as a platform in the article, but then it is not in the comparison table.