
ThingsBoard
IoT analytics platforms
IoT device management platforms
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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$49 per month
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What is ThingsBoard
ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform used to connect, manage, and monitor IoT devices and gateways, with built-in telemetry ingestion, rule processing, and dashboards. It is used by engineering and operations teams for device provisioning, remote monitoring, alerting, and basic IoT analytics/visualization. The platform supports common IoT protocols (such as MQTT, HTTP, and CoAP) and can be deployed as a self-managed server or consumed as a hosted service. It differentiates through its open-source core, extensible rule engine, and on-platform dashboards for operational monitoring.
Open-source and self-hostable
ThingsBoard provides an open-source edition that can be deployed on-premises or in a customer-controlled cloud environment. This supports organizations with data residency, network isolation, or customization requirements. It also reduces dependency on a single hosted runtime and allows deeper platform-level changes than many closed SaaS offerings.
Broad protocol and integration support
The platform supports multiple device connectivity options, including MQTT, HTTP, and CoAP, which helps accommodate heterogeneous device fleets. It also includes connectors and integration patterns for common messaging and data backends, enabling telemetry forwarding and downstream processing. This makes it practical for mixed environments where devices and gateways vary by vendor and capability.
Rule engine with dashboards
ThingsBoard includes a server-side rule engine for routing telemetry, transforming messages, and triggering alerts or actions. It also provides built-in dashboards and widgets for operational visualization without requiring a separate BI tool for basic monitoring. This combination supports end-to-end workflows from ingestion to alerting and visualization within one platform.
Advanced analytics often external
While ThingsBoard supports dashboards and rule-based processing, more advanced analytics (e.g., complex time-series analysis, data science workflows, or large-scale observability use cases) typically requires integrating external analytics systems. Organizations may need additional tooling for long-term historical analysis, model training, or cross-domain correlation. This can increase architecture complexity compared with platforms that focus primarily on analytics at scale.
Operational overhead for self-managed
Running ThingsBoard in production requires managing infrastructure, upgrades, backups, and scaling of components such as databases and message processing. High-ingest or high-availability deployments can require careful sizing and operational expertise. Teams without DevOps capacity may prefer a fully managed service to reduce ongoing maintenance.
Enterprise features may be gated
Some capabilities commonly required in larger deployments (for example, certain advanced security, multi-tenancy controls, or management features) may depend on the commercial editions rather than the open-source edition. This can affect total cost and procurement planning for organizations that start with open source. Buyers should validate which features are included in each edition against their governance and compliance needs.
Plan & Pricing
Public Cloud (North America) pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 / month | 5 devices, 5 assets, 1M data points/month, Community support. (Start Free on thingsboard.cloud) |
| Prototype | $49 / month | 50 devices, 50 assets, 10M data points/month, Community support. |
| Pilot | $149 / month | 100 devices, 100 assets, 100M data points/month; Help desk; White labeling. |
| Startup | $399 / month | 500 devices, 500 assets, 500M data points/month; Priority help desk; White labeling. |
| Business | $749 / month | 1,000 devices, 1,000 assets, 1B data points/month; Priority help desk; White labeling; $0.30 per extra device. |
Note: European (EUR) public-cloud prices are listed separately on the vendor site (e.g., Prototype €45/mo, Pilot €145/mo, Startup €385/mo, Business €725/mo). All public-cloud plans include hosting and email; monthly/annual billing options with 10% savings on annual.
Private Cloud (ThingsBoard Private Cloud) pricing
| Plan | Price (monthly / annual) | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | $1,499 / month (monthly) • $1,349 / month (annual, 10% savings) | 5,000 devices included; 99.9% uptime; 50,000 msg/min; 500 GB storage included; $0.10 per extra device. |
| Growth | $2,199 / month (monthly) • $1,979 / month (annual, 10% savings) | 25,000 devices included; 99.9% uptime; 100,000 msg/min; 1 TB storage; $0.09 per extra device. |
| Scale | $3,999 / month (monthly) • $3,599 / month (annual, 10% savings) | 50,000 devices included; 99.95% uptime; 500,000 msg/min; 2 TB storage; $0.08 per extra device. |
| Enterprise | Custom | 100,000 devices included (default), custom SLA, unlimited message rate, unlimited storage; < $0.05 per extra device; contact sales for custom pricing. |
Top-ups / Usage-based add-ons (vendor-listed packs)
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (packs/top-ups) Free tier/trial: See Cloud free tier and 30-day trial information (separate). Example costs:
- Extra Device pack — $15 (adds +50 devices; +50 assets)
- Extra Customer pack — $10 (adds +10 customers; +10 users)
- Extra Integration pack — $10 (adds +1 integration; +3 converters)
- Extra Calculated Field — $5 (adds +1 calculated field per entity)
- Traffic pack — $5 (adds +2.5M transport messages; +5M transport data points)
- Compute pack — $25 (adds +5M rule engine executions; +1M JS function executions)
- Storage pack — $10 (adds +1B data points storage days)
- Alarm pack — $1 (adds +1000 alarms created)
- Email pack — $1 (adds +1000 emails)
- SMS pack — $15 (adds +100 SMS)
Notes: Vendor lists both Public Cloud and Private Cloud offerings and detailed top-up packs on its official pricing page. All information sourced from ThingsBoard official pricing page.
Seller details
ThingsBoard, Inc.
Private
https://thingsboard.io/
https://x.com/thingsboard
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thingsboard/