Connhex vs. ThingsBoard: why device manufacturers choose Connhex
ThingsBoard is an excellent open-source IoT platform, featuring device management, data collection, processing and visualization. While ThingsBoard Professional Edition shares many similarities with Connhex, there are also significant differences.
This page focuses on key differences for device manufacturers looking for a robust, scalable and comprehensive IoT solution.
The challenge: moving beyond generic IoT to provide monetizable services
Suppose you're a device manufacturer looking to incude revenue-generating connected services in your offering. Here are some challenges you should keep in mind before building a solution on top of general-purpose IoT platforms:
- Integrating multiple systems for a complete service. While using an IoT platform instead of building from scratch is a good idea, you will still need to integrate additional systems (e.g. billing, backups, monitoring, ...) before offering a complete service.
- Slow time-to-market, especially for new features.
- Significant development effort and time required to build essential service layers (e.g. advanced user management, manufacturing integration, ...) on top of a core IoT platform.
- Scalability, reliability and maintenance concerns as device fleets grow.
- The potential diversion of valuable engineering resources away from core innovation.
Connhex has been created to address all of these challenges.
Connhex: the purpose-built IoT Suite for device manufacturers
Connhex is a complete industrial IoT suite designed from the ground up with the needs of device manufacturers in mind.
It enables manufacturers to accelerate time-to-market, de-risk development and focus on their core competencies by providing a comprehensive, integrated, and robust foundation for their connected services.
Connhex vs. ThingsBoard: comparison table
The following table summarizes the key differences between ThingsBoard for device manufacturers.
| Feature / Aspect | ThingsBoard Professional | Connhex | Why this matters for device manufacturers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Design Focus | General-Purpose IoT (Makers, diverse businesses) | Specifically for Device Manufacturers (OEMs) seeking to offer vertically integrated services | Features and architecture are tailored to your business model, accelerating development of product-centric services and ensuring a better fit for your specific needs. |
| Solution Scope | IoT Platform (Device-centric, core IoT functionalities) | Complete IoT Suite (App-centric, includes payments, identity management, manufacturing ops, AI out-of-the-box) | Reduces the need for complex integrations with multiple third-party systems. Provides a more cohesive, end-to-end solution from device to end-user service, speeding up time-to-market for full offerings. |
| Scalability and Reliability | Requires significant in-house expertise for robust scaling | Engineered for high-scale, reliable operations as a managed service with expert support | De-risks your growth and ensures system stability as your device fleet expands, without overburdening your technical team with complex backend infrastructure management. |
| Backend Development Effort | Requires substantial backend customization for advanced services | Minimizes custom backend work; focus on device integration and unique application/UI features | Frees your valuable engineering resources from extensive cloud backend development, allowing them to concentrate on hardware innovation and differentiated user-facing applications. |
| Manufacturing Integration | Generic; requires custom development | Streamlined, built-in manufacturing and device provisioning workflows | Optimizes the entire device lifecycle from factory to field, crucial for efficient production, deployment, and ongoing management at scale. |
| Time-to-Market (Services) | Slower for comprehensive services due to DIY elements | Significantly faster due to pre-built modules, proven architecture, and focus on manufacturer needs | Launch new, revenue-generating connected services more quickly, gain a competitive edge, and respond faster to market demands. |
| Customization and Branding | Customizable dashboards | Tailored User Interfaces; API-first design for headless flexibility | Deliver a unique, fully branded end-user experience that aligns with your product. Greater flexibility to build precisely what you envision for your customers. |
| Service Monetization | Requires custom integration with billing systems | Includes integrated components like Connhex Pay to handle service billing | Simplifies and accelerates the path to launching and monetizing new subscription services and value-added features, creating new recurring revenue streams. |
| Expertise Required | Moderate to high cloud/software development expertise needed | Low cloud/backend expertise required from your team; leverage Connhex's specialized components plus a network of partners always ready to help | Empowers your hardware-focused technical team to deliver sophisticated cloud services without needing to build a large, specialized cloud development unit. |
The following sections cover more in detail some of these points.
A complete suite for faster, end-to-end service delivery
ThingsBoard is an IoT platform: it takes a device-centric approach, focusing on data collection and visualization. Connhex is a complete suite with an app-centric approach, dedicated to build services vertically integrated with physical products.
To achieve this vision, Connhex includes features like subscriptions and payments management, infrastructure monitoring or a powerful IAM system.
Despite being outside the IoT domain, these functionalities are essential to offer connected services: when building on top of an IoT platform, a device manufacturer would need to either build them from scratch or integrate multiple services.
Purpose-built for manufacturing
Connhex is tailored to device manufacturers. For example:
- it includes manufacturing and provisioning routines to manage the complete device lifecycle - from factory to field
- supports firmware versioning, OTA updates and device models through Connhex Control and Connhex Edge
- existing manufacturing systems can be easily integrated, either via API or through an open-source CLI interface
- handles devices already on the field, with a secure remote initialization procedure
- natively supports legacy devices through a mapping mechanism
Connhex also provides additional tools to help manufacturers comply with regulations, like this GDPR compliance map.
ThingsBoard, on the other hand, caters to a broader audience: from makers, hobbyists and educational projects to organizations with large in-house cloud development teams who prefer to build most service components themselves.
Unlocking new revenue streams with true vertical integration
While ThingsBoard provides customizable dashboards, one of Connhex's pillars are bespoke user interfaces - whose sections can be hidden or shown depending on authorization policies. This is part of the previously mentioned app-centric vision: Connhex focuses on enabling the best user experience for a particular use case, from HVAC to spa and swimming pools.
You can also see this difference by comparing ThingsBoard's Trendz Analytics to Connhex AI: while the former provides a low-code algorithm designer, the latter only focuses on providing out of the box anomaly detection and forecasting, without any configuration needed.
Scalability and reliability
ThingsBoard offers a self-hosting option, with data residing on your server: however, you're responsible for monitoring, backups, scaling and updating your instance. With Connhex, you get the best of both worlds: an entire IoT suite on your server, completely managed by us.
Connhex also features several production-grade mechanisms designed to:
- maintain peak performance as databases grow, for example through an aggregation and decimation strategy
- ensure proper data retention and recovery with a double backup scheme
- cover compliance needs, like audits.
When is ThingsBoard better than Connhex?
There are situations where ThingsBoard compares favorably over Connhex, of course. ThingsBoard might be a better fit for:
- makers, hobbyists or educational projects
- companies that only need basic device connectivity and data visualization with no immediate plans for advanced, revenue-generating services
- situations where out-of-the-box, highly configurable dashboards for internal use are the primary requirement
- companies with large, experienced in-house cloud development teams who'd rather build most components themselves from foundational blocks and are looking for an IoT data ingestion layer
- very low volume projects where a pay-per-use model is essential.
Already have a solution based on ThingsBoard? Looking to understand the steps involved in migrating to Connhex? We've put together a detailed guide!
Why device manufacturers choose Connhex
Connhex is a complete industrial IoT suite, while ThingsBoard is an IoT platform. If you're a device manufacturer, Connhex is a better solution to:
- accelerate your time-to-market by leveraging services specifically engineered to offer monetizable services
- de-risk your investment with a proven, scalable and secure industrial-grade suite
- unlock new recurring revenue streams
- achieve true vertical integration between your physical products and connected services
- focus on your core competency, while we handle everything else
- gain a strategic IoT partner with years of experience in supporting device manufacturers
Ready to start offering services integrated with your devices? Go here to explore Connhex in more detail. Still unsure? See how Connhex empowers manufacturers like you or simply reach out: we'll be glad to hear from you!