Datacake vs ThingSpeak

Datacake is an IoT platform that turns sensor data into live dashboards, alerts, and reports. Its monitoring use cases include cold chains, temperature and humidity, indoor air quality, soil moisture, and industrial noise. Users can build real-time dashboards without coding and set thresholds and rules that send alerts by email, SMS, or webhook. Datacake lists more than 400 LoRaWAN device templates across over 125 manufacturers, with payload decoders and dashboards. Every plan includes its managed LoRaWAN Network Server, with unlimited gateways and no per-gateway fees. Data can be streamed to other systems through MQTT, HTTPS webhooks, and a REST API. Native iOS and Android apps support dashboards, device onboarding, alert creation, and push notifications. Its OpenAI-powered assistant can analyze sensor data and help create dashboards, rules, and decoders; changes require confirmation. White-label branding and multi-tenancy are offered for system integrators, distributors, and OEMs. The free plan supports five devices. Hobby costs €25 a month and covers up to 25 devices, with one year of retention.

ThingSpeak is a cloud IoT analytics platform for collecting, visualizing and analyzing live data streams. Devices can send data through REST or MQTT APIs, and listed libraries support Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32, Particle and Raspberry Pi. Each channel stores up to eight fields, with data private by default and an option to make channels public. Users can run scheduled MATLAB code hosted by ThingSpeak without a separate MATLAB license. React and TimeControl apps support responses to channel conditions and scheduled computations. The platform supports near-real-time stream processing, custom dashboards and machine learning tools. MathWorks describes its uses as IoT prototyping, proof-of-concept systems and hosted production for small- to medium-sized systems. The Free plan is free for non-commercial use, with four channels, three million messages per year and a 15-second update interval. MATLAB code execution is limited to 20 seconds for free users; TimeControl cannot schedule MATLAB Analysis more often than every five minutes, and channel visualizations update after ten minutes. Platforms listed are API and web.