What are some popular IoT frameworks used with Laravel?

Laravel acts as a central hub for IoT applications, connecting devices, processing incoming data, and ensuring real-time observability using modern, maintained tools and protocols.

1. Official and High-Performance Laravel Packages

• Laravel Reverb: The first-party, high-performance WebSocket server for real-time IoT dashboards, replacing older abandoned packages.
• php-mqtt/laravel-client: Industry-standard MQTT client for Laravel. Subscribes to topics, receives device messages, and publishes commands.
• jalallinux/laravel-thingsboard SDK: Connects Laravel to ThingsBoard for device management and telemetry access.

2. MQTT Brokers (Messaging Layer)

• Mosquitto: Lightweight, open-source MQTT broker suitable for private IoT deployments.
• HiveMQ / EMQX: Enterprise-grade brokers supporting millions of devices, often integrated with Laravel via Webhooks or SDKs.

3. Edge-Gateway and Visual Flow Tools

• Node-RED: Acts as an Edge Gateway, normalizing sensor data locally before sending it to Laravel APIs via HTTP Requests or Webhooks.
• ThingsBoard: Handles low-level device management and telemetry storage. Laravel uses ThingsBoard SDKs to create custom dashboards and applications.

4. Real-Time Observability

• Laravel Pulse: Monitors IoT worker performance, slow queries, and queue throughput to prevent data backlogs during peak device activity.

Example Architecture: Smart Factory

Sensors send vibration data to a Mosquitto broker via MQTT. A Laravel worker running php-mqtt/laravel-client subscribes to these messages, queues them in Redis, and Laravel Reverb updates the dashboard in real-time for supervisors.

By combining these modern frameworks and packages, Laravel becomes a reliable, scalable, and secure backend for IoT systems.