IoT Platform Comparison: Six Vendors to Keep Watching in 2021

We compare some of the most exciting IoT platforms on the market right now, the ones that check all the boxes when it comes to innovation: Balena.io, Particle.io, Thingworx, Siemens Mindsphere, Adamos, and Record Evolution.

What Is an IoT Platform?

An IoT platform is the middleware and the infrastructure that enables end-users to interact with smart objects. They function as the software bridge between the hardware and application layers. The IoT platform orchestrates the movement of data between IoT devices and IoT applications, providing application-level capabilities for humans to interact with the IoT system. 

Open-Source IoT Edge Projects

Edge computing is a key trend this year in the IoT industry. This past week, Baidu announced a new open-source project, called OpenEdge, that targets edge computing. OpenEdge is certainly not the first open-source project for edge computing. Over the last number of years, there have been many new open-source projects started to address edge computing. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to see how some projects are doing in terms of community and popularity.

It appears most of the projects in the survey have an active core contributor community. Most projects are supported by a main contributing company and accept PR and issues from the wider community. Over time, it will be interesting to see if one of these projects does develop a more robust open-source community of contributors.