I Have a Dream
Kaa vs ThingSpeak
When our university had started to create 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 multi-purpose middleware platform for building complete end-to-end IoT solutions. Kaa has 3 layer architecture as below:
Kaa provides some basic services for you such as Notifications, Logging and Events. In Kaa you have to install SDK on your nodes in order to join them to your network, as a result your node choices decrease, but you have more control on your nodes.
One the most important features of Kaa is it's log collector, with it's log collector you can store your log in NoSQL databases like MongoDB, you can analyze your data with many data processors like hadoop and at the end you can provide your log collector to kaa with simple REST URL callbacking.
Kaa provides in distributed manner and you can build your Kaa based environment on a two or more server for load distribution.
ThingSpeak
ThingSpeak provides Real-time data collection and storage. You can easily create channel for your data in this platform and send your data to it using simple and available REST protocol!
Generally speaking ThingSpeak is less complicated than Kaa but in some point of views it's a good thing because you can up and running it in few steps. ThingSpeak do not have any SDK or package requirements in your nodes, so you can use whatever you want util they can create REST request for ThingSpeak
ThingSpeak indeed provides 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 have your data in your place and provide management on your devices based on your applications.
It's good to remind that Kaa provides many way for creating management and other type applications from REST to SDK! With ThingSpeak you don't need even a PC but it restrict you to Matlab for data analysis and you can't provide controller application for your nodes with this platform.