UbiFunctions is Ubidots' serverless code execution environment that lets you run custom Python or JavaScript logic directly inside your IoT application — no servers or infrastructure required. Use it to process sensor data, call external APIs, send alerts, or automate workflows triggered by device events, schedules, or webhooks.

UbiFunctions supports three trigger types: device variable updates (fires when a sensor value changes or crosses a threshold), time-based schedules (cron expressions for periodic tasks like daily reports or data aggregation), and inbound webhooks (HTTP endpoints that accept data from external services or third-party platforms).

No. UbiFunctions is fully serverless — Ubidots manages all runtime infrastructure, scaling, and dependency resolution. You write code in the built-in browser editor, configure your trigger, and deploy in seconds. Functions scale automatically with your data volume, from a single device to thousands, with no CI/CD pipeline or DevOps work required.

Yes. UbiFunctions includes native Ubidots API access, so your code can read device variables, write computed values, query historical data, and create events — all without external API credentials. You can also store API keys and secrets as environment variables to securely call external services like notification platforms or custom REST APIs.

Data aggregation in Ubidots lets you combine, compare, and visualize data from multiple IoT devices in a single dashboard. Instead of checking each device individually, you can apply calculations like averages and rollups across a group of devices, spot trends, detect anomalies, and monitor fleet-level operations in real time — all without writing custom code.

You can group up to twelve devices in a single multi-device dashboard view. Each dashboard updates dynamically as new data arrives, and you can use any of Ubidots' 20+ widget types — including charts, tables, metrics, and maps — to represent and compare device data side by side in real time.

Ubidots lets you filter, group, and calculate across device variables — applying operations such as averages, sums, and statistical rollups to fleet-level data. Combined with Synthetic Variables, you can define custom math expressions that run in real time across multiple devices, turning raw sensor readings into meaningful, actionable metrics.

Data aggregation is widely used for energy monitoring (comparing electricity, water, and gas consumption across facilities), industrial IoT (tracking equipment or inventory levels across multiple sites), smart irrigation, and fleet-level utility management. Any operation that requires comparing or consolidating readings from multiple devices benefits from multi-device aggregation dashboards.

Synthetic Variables let you define calculated metrics derived from your existing device data — directly inside Ubidots, with no backend code required. Use them to compute energy consumption, convert raw sensor signals into engineering units, track equipment efficiency, or flag anomalies with conditional logic. Results are available across dashboards, alerts, and further calculations.

Synthetic Variables support a wide range of operations: unit conversions (raw voltage or current into engineering units), energy and consumption tracking (power × time = kWh), efficiency ratios (OEE, COP, utilization rates), rolling averages to smooth noisy sensor readings, interval aggregations, conditional classification using if/else logic, and cross-device metrics.

Both. You can configure a Synthetic Variable to compute in real time as new device data arrives, over a rolling time window (e.g., a 15-minute moving average), or on a fixed interval for periodic aggregations like hourly totals or daily summaries. The computation mode is set per variable, giving you precise control over how and when each metric updates.

Yes. Synthetic Variables are configured entirely within the Ubidots interface — no backend code, external APIs, or data pipelines required. You define your formula using an expression builder, select the input device variables, set the computation timing, and the result is immediately available as a regular variable across dashboards, alerts, and reports.

Ubidots lets you replace every default visual with your own brand: upload custom logos for the header, login screen, favicon, and loading screen; apply your color palette to navigation bars, buttons, and headers; set a custom domain so users never see Ubidots’ URL; and add your own CSS stylesheets to fine-tune fonts, shapes, and layouts across the entire application.

Yes. Ubidots supports custom domains on White Label plans, allowing you to point your IoT application to a URL that belongs to your brand. Combined with a custom email sender address and your own logos and colors, end users access the platform entirely under your company’s identity — with no visible reference to Ubidots.

Gray Label applies basic appearance changes but does not include a custom domain, custom logos, color customization, or a branded email sender. White Label provides full branding control — custom logos for every screen, your own domain, full color theming, a custom email address, and optional mobile app branding. Removing the “Powered by Ubidots” badge is available as an Enterprise add-on.

Yes, on Enterprise plans. Ubidots offers a white-labeled mobile app that carries your company’s logo, colors, and visual identity, so your clients interact with what appears to be your own native app rather than a third-party platform. Mobile app white-labeling is quoted on demand — contact the Ubidots sales team for pricing and availability.

Ubidots includes four built-in roles: Explorers (can create, edit, and delete dashboards and events, with view-only access to devices and variables), Viewers (view-only access to dashboards, devices, and variables — no create, edit, or delete), Dashboard Viewers (restricted to viewing dashboards only), and Managers (full admin capabilities except managing end-users). Custom roles can also be created.

Yes. Beyond the four built-in roles, Ubidots lets you define custom roles with any combination of create, view, edit, and delete permissions across dashboards, devices, events, and variables. Custom roles are configured per organization, giving you precise control over what each user type can see and do within your IoT application.

Ubidots multi-tenancy works at two levels. Organizations isolate devices, dashboards, events, and users within an App — suitable when clients need separate data without distinct branding. Apps provide a second layer: each App is an independent IoT portal with its own white-label branding, login portal, and feature configuration. A single Ubidots account can host multiple Apps, letting you deliver a fully branded, isolated experience to each client.

Yes. Each organization in Ubidots is fully isolated — it has its own devices, dashboards, events, and users. Clients assigned to separate organizations see only their own data and cannot access other organizations’ resources. Combined with white-labeling, you can serve multiple clients from one account while each experiences a fully branded, private IoT application.

Ubidots Events support four trigger types: value-based thresholds (when a variable exceeds, drops below, or equals a limit), device inactivity (when a device stops sending data for a set period), geofence (when an asset enters or exits a defined geographic boundary), and scheduled (time-based rules on hourly, daily, or custom cron intervals). Multiple conditions can be combined using AND/OR logic for precision.

Beyond sending alerts, Ubidots Events can take direct control actions. Notification options include email, SMS, voice call, Slack, and webhook. On the control side, events can set a device variable to a specific value or trigger a UbiFunction to run custom serverless logic — enabling fully automated responses to your IoT data without manual intervention.

A Global Event applies a single rule across your entire device fleet using a shared variable label — instead of configuring alerts device by device. This makes it ideal for large deployments where the same condition needs monitoring across hundreds of devices at once. Global Events are available on Industrial and Enterprise plans.

Yes. Active windows let you define the time periods during which an event is allowed to trigger — useful for suppressing alerts outside business hours. By default, an event requires conditions to reset before it can fire again. Enabling the repeat action overrides this, keeping the event firing continuously for as long as conditions persist.

HTML Canvas is Ubidots’ developer-friendly widget that lets you write custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly inside a dashboard. It’s designed for cases where standard widgets don’t meet specific functional or aesthetic requirements — letting you build custom charts, gauges, tables, animations, or any visualization your project demands, rendered live alongside your other widgets.

HTML Canvas supports standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — including React. You can also import CDN-hosted third-party libraries such as charting frameworks and UI toolkits directly in the widget’s settings. There is no proprietary syntax to learn; if it runs in a browser, it works inside HTML Canvas.

HTML Canvas provides built-in methods that give your code direct access to device variables and their values from within the widget editor. You can also enable the “Preload Dashboard data” option to make all dashboard variables available the moment the widget loads, eliminating the need for separate API calls or external data fetching logic.

Use HTML Canvas when a standard Ubidots widget can’t match your exact requirements — whether that’s a custom chart type, a branded display with specific styling, an interactive UI element, or a visualization that depends on logic not available in native widgets. It’s the right choice whenever the built-in library covers the data but not the presentation.

Ubidots uses a two-tier smart storage architecture. Recent data stays in a high-performance hot database optimized for real-time dashboards and fast queries. As data ages, it is automatically archived to cold storage on AWS S3 in Parquet format — organized per variable, with no infrastructure management required. A unified query layer lets you access both tiers from a single interface, with no manual migration.

Long-term retention supports up to 500 GB of cold storage — approximately 32 billion data points, covering around ten years of IoT data depending on ingestion frequency. Archived data is stored in Parquet columnar files (~2.5 million data points per 40 MB file), organized per device and variable. Up to 10,000 variables can be archived monthly, with a quota of 50,000 queries per month.

Yes. Ubidots provides a built-in data navigator that lets you browse and visualize archived data directly from the dashboard — no SQL or external tools required. Historical data can also be accessed via REST API or downloaded as Parquet files per variable. Note that data older than two years may experience slightly slower query performance due to the cold storage tier.

No. Long-term retention (Extended Storage) is available as a paid add-on for Enterprise plan holders only. It is not included in Professional or Industrial plans. The add-on provides up to 500 GB of cold storage, a 50,000 monthly query quota, and up to 10,000 variables archived per month. Contact the Ubidots sales team for pricing and availability.

No. Ubidots offers a progression from simple to advanced. You can start with threshold-based alerts and usage counters built on synthetic variables — no coding required. As your data matures, you can layer in moving average anomaly detection and eventually deploy Python ML models via UbiFunctions, all within the same platform and without a dedicated data science team.

Ubidots supports four approaches: usage-based maintenance (tracking runtime via synthetic variables), vibration monitoring (time-domain RMS and frequency-domain FFT analysis), moving average anomaly detection (flagging deviations from normal operating patterns), and ML model deployment (running Python classification or regression models via UbiFunctions to predict failures or estimate time-to-failure).

Models are deployed as Python scripts via UbiFunctions, Ubidots’ serverless execution environment. The typical workflow: retrieve the latest sensor values, preprocess data and engineer features like rolling averages, load your trained model, generate a prediction, and write the result back to a Ubidots variable — where it can trigger automated alerts or be visualized on a dashboard.

The most useful variables are runtime status (ON/OFF), cycle counts, vibration RMS or peak values, temperature, and energy consumption. Environmental context like humidity or air quality adds further predictive signal. The key is to start logging immediately — including normal and failure-condition data — since labeled failure events are what make ML models accurate over time.

Device Types are reusable templates that standardize how devices are configured when they join your Ubidots account. Each type defines the variables to create (names, units, ranges, and scaling), custom device properties (text, numbers, dates, booleans, JSON), visual appearance (icon and color), and optional tasks such as automatic dashboard generation, event setup, and device group assignment.

Yes. The Tasks step in a Device Type lets you attach automation that runs the moment a new device is created: generate a dashboard from a template pre-wired to the device’s variables, create events or alerts, and assign the device to a group — all without any manual steps. This makes it possible to onboard hundreds of devices to a fully operational state in minutes.

Without Device Types, every new device requires manual setup — creating variables, setting properties, and configuring its appearance one by one. Device Types eliminate that repetition: define your blueprint once, and Ubidots applies the same consistent configuration to every new device automatically. This reduces onboarding time from days to minutes and ensures every device in your fleet is set up identically.

Groups and Tags serve different purposes. Device Groups couple devices together for bulk operations — such as assigning an entire fleet to an organization or triggering a global event across all grouped devices. Tags are flexible labels you can apply to any resource (devices, dashboards, events, reports) for filtering, search, and access control. Groups act on devices; tags organize everything.

Device Groups let you act on many devices at once: add or move an entire group into an organization, trigger a Global Event that monitors all devices in the group simultaneously, or reassign devices between organizational units in a single action. This eliminates the need to configure each device individually as your fleet grows.

You can apply up to 20 tags per resource. Tags work across all resource types — devices, dashboards, events, and reports — letting you apply consistent labels throughout your account. Tagged resources can be filtered instantly in the Ubidots interface or retrieved programmatically via the API, making it easy to manage large fleets organized by location, type, or customer.

Yes. Ubidots supports tag-based access segmentation: assign tags to users and apply matching tags to resources, and each user will only see the devices, dashboards, and events that share their tags. This makes tags a practical tool for multi-tenant deployments where different clients or teams should have visibility into only their own resources.

Device Variables store time-series sensor readings that update frequently and retain a full history of values over time. Device Properties are static metadata — descriptive attributes like location, installation date, firmware version, or owner that rarely change and don’t require historical tracking. Properties describe what a device is; variables capture what it measures.

Ubidots supports seven property formats: text (up to 255 characters), number (float values), true/false (boolean), date, list (a predefined set of text options), JSON (a full JSON object), and device reference (a pointer to another device in your account). This flexibility lets you capture any kind of contextual metadata your operation requires.

Yes. Property values — including JSON properties — can be referenced in Ubidots Events to drive conditional logic. For example, you can use a boolean property as a condition flag or include a JSON property as the payload for a webhook or notification. This allows properties to play an active role in your automation workflows, not just as static labels.

An App is a branded IoT portal that defines the visual experience, domain, language, and features end users see when they log in. An Organization is a container inside an App holding devices, dashboards, events, and users. Use multiple Organizations for separate clients sharing the same interface; create a new App only when clients need a distinct white-label branding experience.

Create a separate Organization for each client within a single App. Each organization is isolated — its devices, dashboards, events, and users are invisible to other organizations. Assign each client’s users to their organization with the appropriate role. If clients need distinct branded portals (custom domain, logo, colors), create a separate App per brand.

Yes. A single user account in Ubidots can be granted access to one or multiple organizations within the same App. This is useful for administrators or technicians who need visibility across several client sites or departments simultaneously. Each organization can have a different role assigned to the same user, giving you per-organization permission control.

User permissions in Ubidots are controlled through Roles, which define what a user can create, view, edit, or delete within the organizations they belong to. Ubidots includes four built-in roles (Explorer, Viewer, Dashboard Viewer, and Manager), and you can create custom roles with any combination of permissions to match your exact access control requirements.

Yes. UbiFunctions can make outbound HTTP requests to any external API from within your function code, allowing you to pull data from third-party services into Ubidots or push Ubidots data to external platforms. Common integrations include notification services, cloud databases, ERP systems, and custom HTTP gateways that accept specialized data formats from IoT devices.

UbiFunctions are commonly used for custom payload decoding (transforming raw device data into meaningful values), third-party API integration (pulling or pushing data on demand), real-time data enrichment and analytics, and building custom HTTP ingestion gateways for non-standard data formats. Any logic that would otherwise require a dedicated backend server is a candidate for a UbiFunction.