Hi HN! I'm Dima from the ThingsBoard team — the company behind the open-source IoT platform and TBMQ, our MQTT broker built on top of Apache Kafka.
Most MQTT brokers hit a ceiling when you need to scale horizontally or survive node failures without message loss. We built TBMQ on Kafka because it's battle-tested at scale across the industry — you get fault tolerance, high throughput, and horizontal scalability as a foundation rather than something you bolt on later.
TBMQ has a Community Edition (open-source) and a Professional Edition with advanced observability, enterprise features, and monitoring. The demo runs the PE version, so you can see the full feature set without installing anything.
Two ways to try it:
- No signup: Connect via MQTT directly to "demo.tbmq.io" — ports 1883 (TCP), 8883 (TLS), 443 (WSS), username - "demo", and no password. Test pub/sub, shared subscriptions, retained messages. Public environment, so no sensitive data.
- Quick SSO signup: Head to https://demo.tbmq.io for read-only access to the full professional UI — live session/subscription browsing, message flow dashboards, and more.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture or tradeoffs. Fair criticism welcome.
Hi HN! I'm Dima from the ThingsBoard team — the company behind the open-source IoT platform and TBMQ, our MQTT broker built on top of Apache Kafka.
Most MQTT brokers hit a ceiling when you need to scale horizontally or survive node failures without message loss. We built TBMQ on Kafka because it's battle-tested at scale across the industry — you get fault tolerance, high throughput, and horizontal scalability as a foundation rather than something you bolt on later.
TBMQ has a Community Edition (open-source) and a Professional Edition with advanced observability, enterprise features, and monitoring. The demo runs the PE version, so you can see the full feature set without installing anything.
Two ways to try it:
- No signup: Connect via MQTT directly to "demo.tbmq.io" — ports 1883 (TCP), 8883 (TLS), 443 (WSS), username - "demo", and no password. Test pub/sub, shared subscriptions, retained messages. Public environment, so no sensitive data.
- Quick SSO signup: Head to https://demo.tbmq.io for read-only access to the full professional UI — live session/subscription browsing, message flow dashboards, and more.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture or tradeoffs. Fair criticism welcome.