ThingsBoard
The open-source IoT platform that pairs device management with 600+ dashboard widgets and a real rule engine.
About
ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for data collection, processing, visualization, and device management, released under the Apache 2.0 license. The Community Edition is free to self-host with Docker (docker run thingsboard/tb-postgres), and there is a paid Professional Edition plus a hosted cloud. A GitHub search snapshot from October 2026 showed roughly 22,500 stars on thingsboard/thingsboard, with regular commits within the last few days, so this is a genuinely maintained project.
The feature set is unusually broad for a free platform: device telemetry ingestion over MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP; a rule engine that transforms data, raises alarms, and triggers actions; customizable dashboards with a large widget library; and an IoT Gateway that bridges legacy protocols like Modbus, OPC UA, and BACnet. ThingsBoard Edge lets you run a local instance that syncs with the cloud, and Trendz Analytics adds anomaly detection and forecasting as a paid add-on. Customer names on the marketing site include Intel, Bosch, and T-Mobile, which is provider-stated.
What it can do
- Device management with per-device telemetry, attributes, and RPC
- Rule engine for data transformation, alarms, and automated actions
- Customizable dashboards with 600+ widgets, maps, and charts
- MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP(S) device protocols out of the box
- IoT Gateway bridging Modbus, OPC UA, BACnet, and other legacy protocols
- ThingsBoard Edge for offline-capable edge deployments
- Multi-tenancy with role-based access control
- Trendz Analytics add-on for anomaly detection and forecasting
Setup
Self-host with Docker: docker run -it -p 9090:9090 thingsboard/tb-postgres, open localhost:9090, log in with the default sysadmin account, then provision devices and send telemetry over MQTT, CoAP, or HTTP. Or sign up for the hosted cloud.
Prerequisites
A Linux server or Docker host for self-hosting (PostgreSQL or Cassandra for production scale); devices that can speak MQTT, CoAP, or HTTP.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: thingsboard.io documents the MQTT/CoAP/HTTP protocols, rule engine, Edge, and gateway; the GitHub repo confirms the Apache-2.0 license and shows ~22.5k stars with commits days before research; AlternativeTo corroborates the self-hosted plus hosted model. Strengths: the most complete open-source IoT platform in its class, genuinely self-hostable, industrial protocol support. Docked for: (1) Professional Edition feature gating (Trendz, some scale features) sits behind a paid tier; (2) at serious scale you are running your own Cassandra/PostgreSQL cluster, which is operational work, not a checkbox; (3) marketing customer logos are provider-stated with no independent deployment sizes published. License: Apache-2.0 (Community Edition); commercial for Professional Edition.
★ 22,537 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 10.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 10.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · ~22.5k GitHub stars with commits days before research (Oct 2026)
- · mqtt/coap/http, rule engine, edge, gateway with modbus/opc-ua/bacnet confirmed on thingsboard.io
- · customer logos (Intel, Bosch, T-Mobile) provider-stated
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.