Plynx vs ThingsBoard
ThingsBoard Community Edition or Plynx for a hobby project
ThingsBoard CE is a full open source IoT platform with a rule engine and professional dashboards. Here is what it asks of you, and when a single board on your phone is the simpler choice.
At a glance
| Feature | Plynx | ThingsBoard |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard built on the phone, widgets bound to pins | yes | ✕ |
| Single JAR, no separate database | yes | ✕ |
| Runs on a Raspberry Pi | yes | needs a bigger host |
| Works with zero hosting | yes | paid Cloud tier |
| AI assistant that reads a live pin | yes | ✕ |
| Home Screen, Lock Screen and Apple Watch | yes | ✕ |
| Rule engine | simple automations | yes |
| Multi-tenant accounts | ✕ | yes |
| Android | ✕ | yes |
| Free and open source | app free, server GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
Read from the sources at the bottom on . If something has changed, tell us.
Which ThingsBoard we mean
ThingsBoard comes in more than one form, and people often compare against the wrong one. ThingsBoard Community Edition is the free, open source, self-hosted version, released under Apache-2.0. ThingsBoard Cloud is a hosted service with paid tiers. This page is about Community Edition, because that is the one a maker would actually install.
Where Plynx fits
Plynx is deliberately small. The server is one JAR file under GPL-3.0 that runs on a Raspberry Pi, and the iPhone app is the interface. There is no rule chain to design because there is not much to route: a widget is bound to a pin and the sketch on your ESP32 or Arduino feeds it. If you do not want to host anything, the free public server is there from the first minute.
These are the shipped defaults, so you can judge the ceiling before you spend an evening on it:
| Default | |
|---|---|
| Devices per account | 50 |
| Projects per account | 100 |
| Messages per second per user | 100 |
| Minute-resolution history kept | 10 days |
| OTA binary size | 2 MB, 5 MB per account |
Those numbers come from the server.properties file that ships with the
server. If you host it yourself you can change them, because it is your file.
What ThingsBoard CE offers
It is a complete platform rather than a dashboard tool. You get device provisioning and credentials, attributes and telemetry, alarms, and a rule engine that runs on the server. If you outgrow a hobby setup, this is the kind of system you move to next.
The dashboards are the other reason people choose it. There is a large widget library, proper layouts and good time-series handling, and a ThingsBoard dashboard on a monitor looks like something a company built. Because you host it yourself, there is no device limit beyond what your hardware can handle.
What it asks in return
Mostly time and a machine. ThingsBoard CE is a Java service with a real database behind it, and it wants more than a Raspberry Pi Zero. The concepts are worth learning, but tenants, device profiles and rule chains are not something you pick up in an evening. For a greenhouse sensor and a pump, that is a lot of platform for two pins.
What Plynx does not do
There is no rule engine in the ThingsBoard sense. Automations belong to one project and are kept simple. There is no multi-tenancy either; it is your account and your projects.
Plynx is iPhone only, with no Android app available today. Push notifications work only through the public server, so if you self-host, the App Store build will not receive push from your instance. By default only minute-resolution history is pruned, while hourly and daily files keep growing, so a long-running self-hosted server deserves an occasional look at disk space.
And the dashboards look like an app, not a control room. If your goal is a wall display, ThingsBoard is the better tool for that.
Choosing between them
If you are managing a fleet, ThingsBoard is built for that. If you have a couple of boards and want them on your phone quickly, Plynx will get you there with far less setup.
Plynx
The better fit when
Plynx is the better fit when you have one or a few boards and an afternoon, you want them as a native app on your iPhone, and you do not want to set up a Java service and a database before you see your first value.
ThingsBoard
The better fit when
ThingsBoard is the better fit when you manage dozens of devices, when you want server-side rules and separate accounts for different users, or when you want dashboards that look professional on a wall-mounted screen.
Using both
You can run both. ThingsBoard for the fleet and the wall display, Plynx for the boards on your bench that you want in your pocket.
Sources (4), read on September 6, 2026
- thingsboard/thingsboard on GitHub (licence and activity)
Apache-2.0, 22,372 stars, last pushed 2026-09-04.
- ThingsBoard pricing page (Community Edition is listed as the open-source platform; Cloud tiers are separate)
- Plynx server limits, shipped defaults
server.properties: user.devices.limit=50, user.dashboard.max.limit=100, user.message.quota.limit=100.
- Plynx on the App Store (price and requirements)
price 0.0, formattedPrice Free, minimumOsVersion 18.6.
ThingsBoard is a trademark of its respective owner. Plynx is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by ThingsBoard. This page describes each product as documented on September 6, 2026, so you can pick the one that fits your project.