Why ThingsBoard?

ThingsBoard is the open-source IoT platform for device management, data collection, processing, and visualization. It provides an IoT infrastructure for all project tasks: from initial device connectivity and stunning visualizations to complex server-side processing and rapid scaling.

If you need full control over your data, infrastructure, and protocols without the vendor lock-in of public cloud IoT hubs, ThingsBoard is the solution.

ThingsBoard is an all-in-one platform. It includes the necessary backend infrastructure to connect devices, process data, and visualize results. Its extensibility is driven by a feature-rich REST API for platform automation, and a library of Rule Engine nodes to meet unique project requirements.

Some highlights include:

• Multi-Tenancy: Native multi-tenancy support. Isolate data and devices between different customers or business units out of the box.
• Digital Twin: Represent physical hardware in the cloud. Build complex hierarchies using Devices, Assets, and Relations to model real-world environments.
• Dashboards: Real-time IoT and SCADA data visualization with 300+ built-in widgets and custom widget support.
• Data Processing: Transform and enrich telemetry, integrate AI models for anomaly detection and pattern recognition.
• Alarms & Notifications: Monitor device health with condition-based triggers and deliver multi-channel alerts via Email, SMS, Slack, or Teams.
• Connectivity:
  • Native support for MQTT, CoAP, HTTP, LwM2M, and SNMP.
  • IoT Gateway: Support for major IIoT protocols: Modbus, BACnet, CAN bus, BLE, OPC-UA, etc.
  • Edge: Decentralized computing component. Processes data locally on-premise and synchronizes only relevant insights to the cloud.
• OTA Updates: Native, production-ready Over-the-Air update engine.
• Mobile App: Fully customizable open-source Flutter Mobile Application that connects directly to your instance.
• Security:
  • Full support for TLS (MQTT, HTTP) and DTLS (CoAP, LwM2M) ensures all data is encrypted in transit.
  • Authenticate devices using basic credentials, access tokens or X.509 certificate chains.
  • Use the built-in User and Customer management to control who has access to specific dashboards and devices.
  • OAuth 2.0 support for external identity providers like Google, GitHub, Okta, or Azure AD.
  • Audit logs maintain full transparency and compliance by tracking user actions and entity changes across the system.
• Scalability: High-availability architecture designed to scale horizontally, supporting millions of connected devices and massive data throughput.

We built ThingsBoard on four core principles to solve the “Prototype-to-Production” gap.

ThingsBoard is deployment-agnostic. Unlike cloud IoT solutions that lock you into specific vendors and pricing models, ThingsBoard runs where you need it.

• Private Cloud / On-Premise: Keep data within your firewall for compliance (GDPR, HIPAA) and security.
• Bare Metal or K8s: Deploy on a Raspberry Pi for a pilot or a Kubernetes cluster for millions of devices.
• Hybrid: Use ThingsBoard Edge to process data locally in factories or remote sites, sending only aggregated data to the cloud.

You own the data. You own the infrastructure.

ThingsBoard supports horizontal scalability without requiring application rewrites.

• Monolithic Architecture: Ideal for startups and pilots. Simple deployment, low maintenance overhead.
• Microservices Architecture: Ideal for massive scale. Decouples core services (Transport, Rule Engine, Web UI) to handle high-throughput loads.

Device heterogeneity is the standard in IoT. ThingsBoard is designed to normalize data from any source, regardless of the protocol or payload format.

• Protocol Agnostic: Connect legacy hardware via Modbus/CAN (using the IoT Gateway) or modern sensors via MQTT/CoAP/LWM2M.
• Data Normalization & Fusion: Use the Rule Engine to transform incoming binary or JSON payloads into a standardized data model before storage. Use Calculated Fields to combine telemetry from multiple devices to provide high-level insights.
• Device Management: Provision, monitor, and control devices remotely using server-side RPC commands.

We redefined Low-Code for IoT engineers.

• Front-end Flexibility: Build custom Widgets and UI components using your own JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
• Back-end Flexibility: Build custom Rule Nodes and extend platform via custom microservices using any programming language.
• Version Control & DevOps: Manage Rule Chains, Dashboards and other entities as JSON files. Use the REST API or Git integration to implement CI/CD workflows, ensuring your configuration is testable and reproducible.