There are a lot of IoT platforms out there, Refer my Post on IoT Platform Companies to get the list of top IoT platforms and best IoT platform open source or free IoT platform and their key features. Depending upon what features or functionalities your are looking for, you will have to decide which is suitable for your needs. In most of home automation's and learning for IoT free IoT platforms are we always looks for. That is why I thought I will share my knowledge on few of the top free IoT platform list available to do your IoT projects.

We will be discussing specifically on three free IoT platform open source, Cayenne vs Blynk , Blynk vs Thingsboard, their key features and Comparisons. In this post we will be specifically talking about Blynk, Cayenne and Thingsboard top IoT tools which are easily available with out cost. There are lot of others tools which are also available as open source home automation IoT tools.

Blynk:

Blynk is a Platform with iOS and Android apps to control Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the likes over the Internet.

It's a digital dashboard where you can build a graphic interface for your project by simply dragging and dropping widgets.

It's really simple to set everything up and you'll start tinkering in less than 5 mins.

Blynk  is not tied to some specific board or shield. Instead, it's supporting hardware of your choice. Whether your Arduino or Raspberry Pi  is linked to the Internet over Wi-Fi, Ethernet or this new ESP8266 chip, Blynk will get you online and ready for the Internet Of Your Things.

You can download Blynk app from below links

Free Blynk app from IOS App store and Play Store.

How Blynk Works: 

Blynk was designed for the Internet of Things. It can control hardware remotely, it can display sensor data, it can store data, vizualize it and do many other cool things.

There are three major components in the platform:

• Blynk App - allows to you create amazing interfaces for your projects using various widgets we provide.
• Blynk Server - responsible for all the communications between the smartphone and hardware. You can use our Blynk Cloud or run your private Blynk server locally. It’s open-source, could easily handle thousands of devices and can even be launched on a Raspberry Pi.
• Blynk Libraries - for all the popular hardware platforms - enable communication with the server and process all the incoming and outcoming commands. Click here to download Blynk libraries.

Now imagine every time you press a Button in the Blynk app, the message travels to the Blynk Cloud, where it magically finds its way to your hardware. It works the same in the opposite direction and everything happens in a blynk of an eye. Refer the documentation on Blynk for more details.

The document Getting Started With The Blynk App which gives the complete details on how to create a blynk account, create a new project in blynk app, Choose your hardware, Unique identifier Auth token for your hardware which is needed to connect to the device, how to add widgets and run the projects. You need to add the blynk libraries in to your computer and configure the auth token in to the program.

My devices Cayenne: 

When we hear cayenne first things comes is Porsche Cayenne or Cayenne Pepper for those are food crazy :). That is not what talking here, we are talking about MyDevices Cayenne who claims that they are the first drag and drop IoT Project builder. Design prototypes and complete IoT solutions with my device Cayenne app in any device or connection.

Main features of Cayenne:

1. Triggers
2. Data Visualization
3. Remote Monitoring
4. SMS & Email Alerts
5. IoT Cloud
6. Asset Tracking

Cayenne IoT ready program for hardware manufacturers will easily enable micro controllers , gateways, sensors and other devices to connect to Internet of Things. Refer my tutorial on simple iot drag and drop app builder cayenne app to know about the detail process on how to sign up in Cayenne and configure for your IoT projects.

 

Cayenne Vs Blynk: 

Before we talk about Cayenne projects and Blynk projects let me list down some of my findings on Pro's and Con's on Cayenne IoT and Blynk.

1. Blynk is more complicated and suitable for those who want to write code for functions where as Cayenne is simple to use and no need to programming or write codes.
2. User interface is small in Blynk and difficult some times, where as Cayenne have a good user interface and easily configurable.
3. Cayenne provides a very easy triggers / rules engine where as Blynk does not provide a simple way to create triggers
4. Cayenne provides scheduling where as Blynk doesnt have easy way to do it.
5. Cayenne is more suitable for beginners where as Blynk can be extensively used for high  end IoT projects using writing your own code.

Thingsboard:

ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for data collection, processing, visualization, and device management. ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform that enables rapid development, management and scaling of IoT projects. The goal is to provide the out-of-the-box IoT cloud or on-premises solution that will enable server-side infrastructure for your IoT applications.

It enables device connectivity via industry standard IoT protocols - MQTT, CoAP and HTTP and supports both cloud and on-premises deployments. ThingsBoard combines scalability, fault-tolerance and performance so you will never lose your data.

Features:

• Provision devices, assets and customers and define relations between them.
• Collect and visualize data from devices and assets.
• Analyze incoming telemetry and trigger alarms with complex event processing.
• Control your devices using remote procedure calls (RPC).
• Build work-flows based on device life-cycle event, REST API event, RPC request, etc
• Design dynamic and responsive dashboards and present device or asset telemetry and insights to your customers
• Enable use-case specific features using customizable rule chains.
• Push device data to other systems

Refer the documentation to get the complete details about Thingsboard. We will be using Thingsboard community edition for our IoT Projects.