ThingsBoard

What ThingsBoard is

ThingsBoard is an IoT platform, which makes it a different animal from a general app builder. The home page describes it as "The IoT platform between your equipment and your customers" and says it "includes from the start all tools and components you need to develop your IoT application." You build solutions around connected devices such as smart meters, freezers and pumps, and the finished product is a set of dashboards, alarms and mobile apps your own customers use. It suits engineering and product teams that need to put monitoring in front of their customers, and the same pages also serve the enterprise buyer with on-premises and air-gapped installs and multi-tenancy.

The company page tells the history. ThingsBoard started in 2016 with 2 co-founders, ThingsBoard Inc. was established in 2018, and the company says it has grown into "a team of over 100" and is "trusted by thousands of organizations globally." In 2026 it brought its products together under a single ThingsBoard platform and moved to the Business Source License, and it says the full source code "is now available to every user". The home page calls the product "source-available".

What you build and how

Connecting devices. Devices connect "directly, through an IoT gateway, from a LoRaWAN or NB-IoT network, or via a platform integration". The home page lists MQTT, Modbus, LoRaWAN, HTTP, OCPP, OPC UA, CoAP, Sigfox and BACnet among the protocols. The IoT Gateway "brings legacy equipment online", translating Modbus, OPC UA, BACnet, SNMP, KNX and "25+ industrial protocols" to MQTT, and the page says it is open-source and runs on a Raspberry Pi or industrial PC. Device emulators let you test with realistic data before hardware ships. A data point on the pricing page is "a single telemetry measurement (e.g., temperature=22)", so the data layer is a stream of measurements from devices and assets.

Modeling and logic. You "organize devices, assets, customers, and hierarchies that match your case", building digital twins such as a warehouse, a zone and a cold storage unit with its probes. Rule chains, alarm rules and calculated fields process the data: the page talks about normalizing payloads from any device, spotting anomalies, filtering noise before alerts reach your team, and pushing data and notifications into "your CRM, ERP, or other external app". OTA updates push firmware to a whole device profile at once.

Dashboards. You assemble views from "600+ widgets", including charts, gauges, maps and SCADA symbols, and control devices from the same screen with "No front-end code required". A built-in editor makes custom widgets. Dashboards carry role-based access and can be shared with your team, your customers and their end users. The use cases show what they are for: smart energy and smart metering with leakage and fraud alerts, water metering, smart farming, fleet tracking with live routes, environment monitoring, a smart office with remote control and OTA updates, smart retail freezers and shelves, and SCADA dashboards for a swimming pool and an energy site.

AI. The home page says you can "describe what you need in plain language and the platform builds it": an AI Solution Creator builds a solution from scratch and an AI Assistant edits it. The demo shows the assistant creating an alarm rule for a freezer door left open, a notification rule that emails the store manager, and a calculated field charted on a dashboard. Trendz adds "predictive analytics, anomaly detection and forecasting", natural-language queries and AI agents over your data.

Code and CLI. The ThingsBoard CLI is built "for AI coding agents": you develop from a terminal, "every change is versioned in git, and one push ships it to dev, staging, or production." The platform extends "via APIs" to "integrate with any external system".

Mobile. The Mobile App Builder is the reason this product sits in the mobile apps category as well: "Dashboards, alarms and device control in your pocket. Push notifications when something needs attention, and white-label builds you can ship under your own brand", on iOS and Android.

Branding, tenants and security. White-labeling works "no coding or service restart required" and is multi-level, so your customers and their customers can brand their own interface. Installations are multi-tenant with "full data isolation between tenants". Roles and permissions go down to the individual entity, with OAuth 2.0 SSO and two-factor authentication. The home page says it is "ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified" and that each LTS release receives security patches plus "an independent third-party penetration test".

Hosting and scale. ThingsBoard Cloud is fully managed, with a North America or Europe data region at sign-up and no credit card required. Private Cloud is a dedicated cluster run by the company. On-premises runs in your cloud, data center, or fully air-gapped. The home page says you can "start with 5 devices on a single server and grow to 5+ million on a clustered deployment", on PostgreSQL, Citus or Cassandra. Edge processes data locally during outages, TBMQ is a dedicated MQTT broker, and the IoT Hub is a free marketplace of device libraries, solution templates, widgets and rule chains.

Plans and prices

The North America cloud plans on the pricing page are Free at $0 a month (5 devices, 5 assets, 1M data points a month, community support), Prototype at $49 (50 devices, 50 assets, 10M data points), Pilot at $149 (100 devices, 100 assets, 100M data points, help desk and white labeling), Startup at $399 (500 devices, 500M data points, priority help desk) and Business at $749 (1,000 devices, 1B data points, $0.30 per extra device up to 5,000 devices). The Europe tab lists the same plans at €45, €145, €385 and €725. Cloud add-ons include Edge from $9 a month, Trendz from $29 a month, and a white-labeled mobile app at $99 a month plus a one-time setup fee of $1,000. Top-up packs add devices, users, integrations, traffic, compute, storage, alarms, emails, SMS and 1M AI credits for $5 a month.

Private Cloud plans start with Launch for 5,000 devices with a 99.9% uptime SLA, then Growth for 25,000 devices and Scale for 50,000 devices with a 99.95% SLA, with 10% off annual payment and a custom Enterprise tier. On-premises subscriptions include unlimited customers, dashboards, integrations, API calls, data points and messages: Free at $0 with 100 devices and 1 production instance, Pilot at $99, Startup at $299 with 2 instances and Business at $499 with 3. A perpetual license starts from $4,999.

The FAQ says the cloud has a free 30-day trial with "all core features and Trendz Analytics tool with limited usage". Billing runs through Stripe, you can cancel anytime, unused time is not refunded, and inactive devices are charged. Cloud hosting sits in an IaaS that the FAQ says is compliant with "SOC II, and ISO 27001".

Who it suits

ThingsBoard suits a company that sells or runs connected equipment and wants customers to see device data, receive alarms and carry a branded mobile app, without writing an IoT backend. It fits teams that want the choice of managed cloud with EU or North America residency, a dedicated cluster, or their own air-gapped servers. Developers get the source code, the CLI and a git workflow.

It is not a general-purpose no-code tool. You will not build a CRM, a store or an internal approval flow here, and the starting point assumes devices sending telemetry. Because pricing follows device count and message volume, and every created device is billed, a large fleet needs a cost estimate before launch.