When our university started to build an IoT platform, we did some research and decided to use Kaa as our middleware/platform. In this article we want to compare Kaa and ThingSpeak.
Introduction
Kaa
Kaa is a multi-purpose middleware platform for building complete end-to-end IoT solutions. Kaa has a 3-layer architecture as shown below:
Kaa provides some basic services for you, such as Notifications, Logging and Events. In Kaa you have to install an SDK on your nodes in order to join them to your network; as a result your node choices decrease, but you have more control over your nodes.
One of the most important features of Kaa is its log collector. With the log collector you can store your logs in NoSQL databases like MongoDB, you can analyze your data with many data processors like Hadoop, and finally you can connect your log collector to Kaa with a simple REST URL callback.
Kaa runs in a distributed manner, and you can build your Kaa-based environment on two or more servers for load distribution.
ThingSpeak
ThingSpeak provides real-time data collection and storage. You can easily create a channel for your data on this platform and send your data to it using the simple and readily available REST protocol!
Generally speaking, ThingSpeak is less complicated than Kaa, and in some ways that’s a good thing because you can get it up and running in a few steps. ThingSpeak does not have any SDK or package requirements on your nodes, so you can use whatever you want as long as it can create a REST request for ThingSpeak.
ThingSpeak provides a 2-layer architecture for your IoT platform. In this architecture ThingSpeak just collects and stores your data, and you can do some MATLAB-based analysis on it.
Comparison
| Platform | Notification | Events | Logging | Layers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kaa | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | 3 |
| ThingSpeak | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ | 2 |
Conclusion
Personally, I think Kaa can be used in a local environment when you have your own cloud and servers. With Kaa you can always keep your data in your own place and manage your devices based on your applications.
It’s worth noting that Kaa provides many ways to create management and other types of applications, from REST to SDK! With ThingSpeak you don’t even need a PC, but it restricts you to MATLAB for data analysis and you can’t build a controller application for your nodes with this platform.