Best Free IoT Operating Systems

Developed in partnership with the world’s leading chip companies over a 15-year period, and now downloaded every 170 seconds, FreeRTOS is a market-leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS includes a kernel and a growing set of IoT libraries suitable for use across all industry sectors. FreeRTOS is built with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use. With proven robustness, tiny footprint, and wide device support, the FreeRTOS kernel is trusted by world-leading companies as the de facto standard for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. With detailed pre-configured demos and Internet of Things (IoT) reference integrations, there is no need to determine how to setup a project. Quickly download, compile, and get to market faster. Our partner ecosystem provides a breadth of options including community contributions and professional support.

Arm Mbed OS is a free, open-source IoT operating system that includes all the necessary features to develop IoT products. The OS includes everything you need to develop smart, connected products on Arm Cortex-M based hardware, including machine learning capabilities, security, connectivity stacks, an RTOS kernel and drivers for sensors and I/O devices. Arm Mbed OS is designed for the Internet of Things. It is integrated with connectivity, machine learning, networking, and security stacks and is supported with software libraries, development hardware, tutorials and examples. From hardware to the cloud, Mbed OS supports more than 70 silicon, module, cloud, and OEM partners, optimizing your developer choice. By using the Mbed OS API, your application code can remain clean, portable, and simple, while taking advantage of security, communications and machine learning. The integrated solution reduces development cost, time, and risk.

Contiki-NG is an open-source, cross-platform operating system for Next-Generation IoT devices. It focuses on dependable (secure and reliable) low-power communication and standard protocols, such as IPv6/6LoWPAN, 6TiSCH, RPL, and CoAP. Contiki-NG comes with extensive documentation, tutorials, a roadmap, release cycle, and well-defined development flow for smooth integration of community contributions. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, Contiki-NG sources are distributed under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license. This license gives everyone the right to use and distribute the code, either in binary or source code format, as long as the copyright license is retained in the source code.