The easiast way to get started with Kaa is by signing up to the Kaa IoT Cloud. There's a free plan that allows you to connect and manage up to 5 devices for an unlimited time, with the access to the entire set of Kaa features. For enterprise-grade trials, you can request a free trial of Kaa in a dedicated, privately hosted environment. Here's what to do:
- get a KaaID
- create a free Kaa IoT Cloud account or request Free Trial of Kaa in a dedicated hosted environment
- go to Getting Started Tutorials to learn about how to use Kaa
- create your first IoT solution on Kaa!
Yes, absolutely. In fact, this is one of the best ways to take advantage of our free plan on the Kaa IoT Cloud. Create a small-scale application with up to 5 devices real fast, try it out for as long as you need, and then decide whether it fits your needs. There's no prior commintment! For help and support questions, please do use our direct KaaIoT engineering support chat in Gitter.
The Kaa IoT Cloud is quite easy to get started with, even with no prior IoT development experience. You're not required to use a console for usual tasks and you can build an end-to-end IoT application - from connecting a device to tracking telemetry and doing analytics - only by the means of the Kaa graphical UI. Adding a new device to start tracking its telemetry only takes a few steps in Kaa. So, you may spend only a few hours and have your complete PoC ready on Kaa.
On the other hand, Kaa also provides advanced capabilities for deploying new microservices, building multiple applications for a single device, configuring reusable device context for dashboards, etc. Mastering those capabilities may take a bit longer, so make sure you refer to our tutorials and documentation for the best results.
Kaa offers a broad choice of hosting options. For an easy start, we recommend that you use the Kaa IoT Cloud, which is the PaaS format of the Kaa IoT Platform. It is hosted by us and requires no setup or configuration on part of the user. Each user has their separate, fully isolated space for IoT development.
Enterprise users who wish to have an entire Kaa instance set up according to their preferences may use either the Self-Hosted option to deploy Kaa on their cloud of choice or the KaaIoT-Hosted option to have their Kaa instance hosted by us.
To summarize:
Easy start, separate tenant on a public cloud hosted by KaaIoT: Kaa IoT Cloud
Enterprise-grade, separate Kaa instance hosted by KaaIoT: KaaIoT-Hosted
Enterprise-grade, separate Kaa instance hosted on your cloud of choice: Self-Hosted
You can explore these 3 deployment types on our pricing page .
An endpoint is a digital twin that you created for your device in Kaa. An active endpoint is the one actively communicating data with / from Kaa in a billing cycle. When you have an endpoint in a platform, but no data exchange related to that endpoint occurs, the endpoint is not considered active.
That said, it is up to you what part of your device you want to call an endpoint. For example, you may create one endpoint for your smart fridge or split it into several - one for a freezer, one for a lighting unit, etc. Or, maybe, what you need is an endpoint representing an entire kitchen because you only need to measure total electricity consumption by all the appliances located there. Our pricing policiy, thus, is based on the number of active endpoints currently used by your Kaa account.
It depends on how you want to represent a gateway and connected sensors on the platform. If they constitute one logical entity - it is one endpoint, otherwise - multiple.
Out of the box, Kaa supports the following popular protocols: plain MQTT, MQTT/TLS, MQTT/Websocket, plain HTTP, HTTP/TLS. You can also create custom comnnectivity protocols or use the Kaa IoT Gateway for a broad variety of connectivity options.
For the most popular MQTT protocol, Kaa ensures secure connection of your IoT devices by utilizing SSL/TLS certificates for authentication and encryption. As for the user communication, we use HTTPS protocol to safeguard any sensitive data that is being sent between user and Kaa, and OAuth 2.0 industry-standard protocol for authorization for secure access to APIs.
The first generation of the Kaa platform was open-source and it's still available for download on our website. However, the new generation of Kaa offers a superior feature set and a more flexible, cloud-native architecture based on microservices. It is also easier to use. That's why we recommend using the latest generation of Kaa for all our users. We made the transition between the open-source and enterprise Kaa generations as smooth as possible for our community by introducing an unlimited free plan for 5 devices and making the platform as customizable as possible.
Yes, white labeling is available for Kaa. Contact us to learn more.
We offer standard subscription-based plans as detailed on the pricing page. Contact us to discuss any custom-tailored plans.
Our server locations:
Kaa Cloud: 🇮🇪Ireland
KaaIoT-Hosted: 🇺🇸US, 🇩🇪Germany, 🇳🇱Netherlands, 🇸🇬Singapore, 🇬🇧United Kingdom, 🇮🇳India, 🇨🇦Canada
Self-hosted: 🌍Anywhere
KaaIoT-Hosted servers can also be deployed in other locations based on an agreement with the customer.