Updated:July 4, 2022 By

Guide to IOT Dashboards and Platforms

mqtt-dashboardIOT dashboards are essential for visualizing IOT data, and controlling IOT devices.

A Dashboard is a crucial component of any IOT platform.

IOT Platforms

An IOT platform is an hardware and software system for managing IOT devices and collecting, storing, visualising and analysing data from those devices.

There are many IOT platforms on the market, and the functionality of these platforms varies enormously.

Although All IOT platform will have a dashboard to display data some platforms are essentially a dashboard and are only really capable of displaying data from devices.

Dashboards vs Platforms

You will often find the terms Dashboard and platform used interchangeably.

An IOT Dashboard can be considered as a basic IOT platform

A Dashboard can Usually

  • Display data
  • Control devices

However an IOT platform can Usually

  • Collect data from various sources
  • Store data
  • Control Devices
  • Display Data
  • Run Tests
  • Deploy device updates
  • Manage device Inventory

Open Source or Proprietary

Both open source and proprietary platforms are available but open source platforms are likely to predominate.

Cloud or Local Platforms

Some platforms are available as cloud only solutions- Platform as a Service whereas others are available for local installation on your own hardware.

Enterprise and Medium/Small Business

Large vendors like IBM and SAP will focus on large organisations.

Just as happened with the web. Many Platforms targeted at small to medium sized businesses will be available and it is likely that a “WordPress” type IOT platform will eventually emerge and dominate.

Current Platforms and Usage

Thingsboard -ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for device management, data collection, processing and visualization for your IoT projects

Thingstream -Thingstream’s intelligent Global Connectivity Platform provides low power, low cost, ubiquitous IoT connectivity via MQTT over GSM.

ThingWorx– ThingWorx delivers tools and technologies that empower businesses to rapidly develop and deploy powerful industrial IoT applications and augmented reality (AR) experiences.

Thingspeak -ThingSpeak is the open IoT platform with MATLAB analytics.

Wolkabout – IoT Application Enablement Platform that integrates any device, transforms real-time readings into meaningful data and combines different devices and services into a complete IoT solution.

IOTgo -IoTgo is an open source IoT platform, like WordPress, ZenCart and all other open source software, you can deploy your own IoTgo cloud platform.

kaa -Kaa is an open-source IoT platform for device management, data collection, analytics and visualization, remote control, software updates and more.

OpenRemote – 100% open source IoT platform running in Docker. It can be installed on local hardware, starting with RaspberryPi4, or hosted servers, while the Edge Gateway model can connect both, allowing for basic but very useful overview dashboards and remote control.

There is an Introduction video on Youtube, or you can try out their Demo. The complete codebase can be found on GitHub including a Quick start

datacake – Low cost, low code IOT platform also offering node-red hosting.

MQTT Dashboards

These are dashboards that support the MQTT protocol and can be used to display data from MQTT devices.

Node-Red – Open source Node js based platform for flow based programming. Device management using the node-red UI.

It can be used both for data monitoring, and device control.

This article is a good introduction to node-red. Here is the Github page.

Note: I expect this list will grow considerably in the future.

Thingsboard– Open source data visualization and device management. Open source Apache license. Available as cloud service or to install on local hardware.

There is a good introductory YouTube video here

See Creating an MQTT Dashboard Using Thingsboard

Freeboard.io – Open source -Very popular but doesn’t currently support MQTT out of the box

However there is an MQTT data source plugin available here.

Available as a service but also available from Github

Looking through the Github page it doesn’t seem to be being actively developed.

Android Based MQTT Dashboards and Device Control

These are very useful for viewing and controlling individual devices and small systems.

Note: you can see an example of using MQTT Dashboard in the controllable sensor tutorial

Summary

The IOT Platform and Dashboard market is still very new and is developing rapidly and by 2023 is expected to reach $23 billion. –IOT Analytics

Just as with Operating systems one or two main platform will eventually dominate the market.

However I would expect that because of the breadth of the IOT market there will be IOT platforms for specific industries like manufacturing, cars, health care,smart home etc.

Resource Articles:

Video

Related Tutorials

Please rate? And use Comments to let me know more

20 comments

  1. Hi steve. I want to have a connection between the end device and the end user to receive data and control the device based on the LoRaWAN protocol. Can you give me a detailed overview and what platform should I use? Node-red or Thingsboard. I am a beginner in this field, but I am somewhat familiar with Node-red.

    Reply

  2. Hi Steve,
    I have tasmota device and wanted to configure it with thingsboard.
    I have configure few ESP32 devices with thingsboard. But facing problem in Tasmota.

    I have designed tasmota device to control 4 electric appliances. It can communicate with mosquito MQTT. But it is not communicating with thingsboard. I can not control the 4 channel relay from thingsboard.

    I have used Client ID as username in Tasmota (as per your youtube video.).
    I have used Basic GPIO Control to manage 4 channel relay on tasmota device.

    Thanks in advance.

    Reply

    1. Hi
      You need to look at using the API. I have tried it but found it confusing and so I admit I just left it as I don’t intend to use thingsboard.

      Reply

  3. Hi Steve, I want to get data from a tasmota device, and store it on Raspberry Pi. Now I want to visualize that data, on an android app. For example, Sonoff POW will be storing data on a Raspberry Pi over MQTT and a database. Now, what can I do to show and visualize that data and show it on an android app?

    Reply

  4. One more thing…I see now that although I am using CAT-M1 network to deliver data, I still can use MQTT protocol so I guess my option with the ThingsBoard is still open. Yet, I have the same question of how to deliver data: one tuple at a time (every 5msec) or in chunks of 200 tuples (roughly every second) or 2000 tuples (every 10 sec).

    Reply

    1. Hi Leon
      Thingsboard or node-red. If you contact me on the ask steve page and you can send some sample data then we can try it.
      rgds
      steve

      Reply

      1. I want to develope a dashboard on ibm cloud and install node red in it for my iot project.
        Please guide me on this as I’m an electronic student and have no knowledge about this.

        Reply

  7. Hi Steve!

    Do you have any clues on how to use Thingsboard control widget to be integrated with node-red? I would like, for example, to turn on or off a device via Thingsboard widget. My rule engine is on Node-Red and I suppose that I can recieve the command from Thingsboard to Node-Red some how.

    Reply

    1. You should be able to send commands from thingsboard but I tried about 6 months ago and couldn’t get it to work.
      Is there any reason why you don’t just use the node-red dashboard?
      Rgds
      Steve

      Reply

      1. They are two different tools. I find Node-red much more flexible and it can be used for control as well as display.
        Thingsboard is IMO mainly a dashboard for displaying data.

        Reply

  8. Can I call that mosquitto as a platform in my thesis?Is this label wrong? And why?
    thank you so much

    Reply

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