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The easiest way to get started with Kaa is by signing up for the Kaa IoT Cloud. There's a 14 days free trial that allows you to connect and manage up to 5 devices, with access to the entire set of Kaa features. Here's what to do:

Yes, absolutely. In fact, this is one of the best ways to take advantage of our 14 days free trial on the Kaa IoT Cloud. Swiftly create an application for up to 5 devices during the free trial, evaluating its fit for your needs without any limitations on functionality. There's no prior commitment! For help and support questions, please use our direct KaaIoT engineering support chat in Gitter or contact us.

The Kaa IoT Cloud is quite easy to get started with, even with no prior IoT development experience. You don’t need to use a console for typical tasks. Also, you can build an end-to-end IoT application only by means of the Kaa graphical UI: from connecting a device to tracking telemetry and doing IoT analytics. 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 webinars and 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. We host it, so there is no setup or configuration on the part of the user. Each user has a 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:

Kaa Cloud: ready-to-go Kaa PaaS with a separate tenant on a public cloud hosted by KaaIoT

KaaIoT-Hosted: Kaa IoT instance managed and hosted by KaaIoT

Self-Hosted: Separate Kaa IoT platform hosted on your hardware or in the cloud you choose, with optional infrastructure support for an additional cost

You can explore these 3 deployment types on our pricing page.

An endpoint is a digital twin 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 on 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 policy, therefore, is based on the number of active endpoints currently used by your Kaa account.

The number of endpoints you are charged for depends on how you want to represent your gateway and sensors on the platform.

If you want to manage permissions for each device individually, you will need to register each sensor as an endpoint. This will give you granular control over permissions for each device.

If you are only interested in managing permissions for the gateway as a whole, you can register the gateway as a single endpoint. This will simplify your permissions management, but you will not be able to set permissions for individual sensors.

In addition to permissions management, endpoints are also used for asset management. If you want to set device relationships, manage related data, or visualize your devices as separate entities, you will need to register each sensor as an endpoint and link this endpoint to the gateway endpoint.

There are no additional charges for using any of the Kaa platform features and components. Except for using the additional Node-RED service. All other functionalities are included in the standard offering without any extra cost.

Out of the box, Kaa supports the following popular protocols: plain MQTT, MQTT/TLS, MQTT/Websocket, plain HTTP, and HTTP/TLS. You can also create custom connectivity protocols, use an IoT gateway, or integrate Node-RED for a broad variety of connectivity options.

The Node-RED integration allows you to easily connect your IoT devices and interact with the Kaa platform. Kaa offers managed Node-RED services to help with IoT device integration. You can create your own Node-RED instance with its help in no time at all. That being done, you'll be able to begin constructing your own IoT flows using the devices you've connected.

With the Kaa Node-RED managed service, you can easily receive data from your devices via different protocols and then forward the data to KaaIoT via a supported protocol of your choice from the ones listed above.

If your device doesn't use a standard protocol, such as MQTT or CoAP, and you want to connect it to the Kaa IoT platform, you may need to use a gateway or a middleware solution that can translate the communication between your device and the Kaa IoT platform.

Kaa offers managed Node-RED services so that it acts as a middleware to integrate IoT devices. Create IoT flows to receive data from your device using its protocol, and then forward received data to KaaIoT using a supported protocol. It only takes minutes to set up your own Node-RED instance and start building your IoT flows.

To make integration even easier, the Kaa team has created a comprehensive tutorial on how to connect devices to the Kaa IoT platform via HTTP using Node-RED. You can also find a detailed guide on connecting Node-RED to Kaa in our documentation.

For the most popular MQTT protocol, Kaa ensures a secure connection to your IoT devices by utilizing SSL/TLS certificates for authentication and encryption. As for user communication, we use the HTTPS protocol to safeguard any sensitive data that is being sent between the user and Kaa and the 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 a 14 days free trial 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: 🇩🇪Germany
KaaIoT-Hosted: 🌍Anywhere, but please note that our pricing applies to hosting in these locations.
Self-hosted: 🌍Anywhere

KaaIoT-Hosted servers can also be deployed in other locations based on an agreement with the customer.

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