Receiving telemetry has been a solved problem for years. Yours is probably elsewhere: what a breached threshold triggers, and who deals with it.
The two products start from opposite places. A dedicated IoT platform is a technical foundation: you host it, configure it, build on top of it, and you get exactly what you built. Thingsform comes at the subject from downstream: telemetry arrives in a workspace that already holds the intervention forms, the tasks, the reports and the documents. So the choice turns less on protocols, largely shared, than on whether you want to build a platform or wire sensors into a way of working that already exists.
The questions to ask any tool, ours included. The answer given here is Thingsform's.
MQTT and HTTP for general connectivity, plus the industrial protocols Modbus, OPC-UA and BACnet. This is the expected baseline in industrial and building-management settings; it is the entry point to the subject rather than the deciding criterion.
An alert, then an assigned intervention task with its deadline, and the form the technician will fill on site. The chain runs from sensor to signed report with no development linking it — the difference in kind between the two approaches.
Thingsform is a managed service, hosted on servers located in the European Union, with daily backups and monitoring. No infrastructure to run on your side, which matters most when the team installing the sensors is not an IT operations team.
Sector dashboards ship configured, and the modules are already connected to one another. A maintenance team therefore gets a working setup with no development resource, which moves the project from a technical budget to an operational one.
The IoT module is included from the Pro plan, industrial protocols and sector dashboards included. The downstream modules — forms, tasks, reports — are available earlier, which lets you test the intervention chain before connecting the first sensor.
Often, no. Here are both cases, in the honest order.
Yes, over MQTT or HTTP for most equipment, and Modbus, OPC-UA or BACnet in industrial settings. The right way to check is to connect one representative sensor before committing to a rollout: surprises almost always come from the site, never from the protocol.
Yes, and it is a common scenario: a technical platform keeps very-large-scale collection, and Thingsform receives the events that call for human action. The natural boundary runs between supervision and intervention.
The intervention form keeps capturing offline, photos included, and syncs when the connection returns. This is the common case in plant rooms and basements, precisely where most instrumented equipment sits.
We describe neither the features nor the terms of another project, which evolve at their own pace. This page sets out the criteria to examine and Thingsform's answers. For the other tool, its current documentation is authoritative.
ThingsBoard is a trademark of its publisher, cited here for reference. This page does not describe its features or pricing, which change over time: refer to its current terms.
The right way to decide
Rebuild your hardest form on the free plan, and have it filled in the field. Half a day is enough, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.