SHSelfHostIndex

Mosquitto vs ThingsBoard

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted home automation options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
MO Mosquitto Lightweight MQTT message broker VS TH ThingsBoard Open-source IoT platform for device management and data
FeatureMosquittoThingsBoard
CategoryHome AutomationHome Automation
LicenseEPL-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguageCJava
Setup difficultyEasyHard
Min. RAM64 MB2,048 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metaldocker, kubernetes, bare-metal
GitHub stars★ 11,101★ 22,200
First released20092017
ReplacesSmartThingsAWS IoT, Azure IoT

Why pick each one

Choose Mosquitto if…

  • Extremely lightweight
  • Rock-solid reliability
  • Ubiquitous in smart homes
Mosquitto details

Choose ThingsBoard if…

  • Powerful IoT platform
  • Highly customizable dashboards
ThingsBoard details

Frequently asked questions

Is Mosquitto or ThingsBoard better?

Neither is universally better. ThingsBoard has the larger community, while Mosquitto is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Mosquitto and ThingsBoard free and open-source?

Yes. Mosquitto is licensed under EPL-2.0 and ThingsBoard under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Mosquitto and ThingsBoard with Docker?

Mosquitto: yes. ThingsBoard: yes.

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