The Things Network
The free, community-run LoRaWAN network plus the open-source Things Stack to run your own.
About
The Things Network (TTN) is a global, community-driven LoRaWAN network: volunteers run gateways, anyone can connect devices for free, and local communities from Berlin to Lagos to Timisoara keep coverage alive. It is a do-it-yourself network, not a commercial provider, so there are no service guarantees, but it is free and genuinely worldwide, with deployments in almost every country.
The software behind it is The Things Stack, an open-source LoRaWAN Network Server under Apache-2.0 (~1.1k GitHub stars), covering LoRaWAN 1.0.x and 1.1, Class A/B/C devices, OTAA and ABP, a join server, an identity server with OAuth 2.0, a CLI, and a web console. The same codebase ships as The Things Stack Cloud through The Things Industries, the commercial company behind the project, for teams that need SLAs and hosted scale. If you want your own private LoRaWAN network without the public community fabric, the stack is the self-hostable route.
What it can do
- Free community LoRaWAN coverage in hundreds of cities
- The Things Stack: open-source network, application, and join servers
- LoRaWAN 1.0.x and 1.1, Class A/B/C, OTAA and ABP
- MQTT and HTTP integrations for application data
- Payload decoding with custom JavaScript formatters
- Gateway and end-device management console
- Commercial SLA-backed cloud via The Things Industries
Setup
Create a free TTN account, register an application and end device (OTAA or ABP), and either use nearby community gateways or register your own gateway via the packet forwarder.
Prerequisites
A LoRaWAN-capable device and gateway hardware; familiarity with LoRaWAN concepts (devEUI, app keys, frequency plans).
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: the lorawan-stack README confirms the Apache-2.0 license, the LoRaWAN 1.0.x/1.1 feature set, and the server components; community pages corroborate the free community-gateway model in cities like Berlin and Ostfriesland; third-party writeups confirm The Things Industries as the commercial arm. Strengths: free global community network, fully open-source core, clear commercial upgrade path. Docked for: (1) the community network carries no availability guarantees, which limits production use; (2) modest GitHub star count relative to the project's ambition; (3) LoRaWAN's low bandwidth constrains use cases. License: Apache-2.0.
★ 1,165 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · lorawan-stack ~1.1k stars, supports LoRaWAN 1.0.x/1.1, Class A/B/C, OTAA/ABP
- · community network free but no SLA; The Things Industries is the commercial arm
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.