What is TDengine used for?

TDengine is an open-source, cloud-native time-series database for IoT, connected vehicles and industrial data, with built-in caching, stream processing and data subscription. It is a good fit for industrial IoT sensor data, connected vehicle telemetry, and infrastructure and metrics monitoring.

Is TDengine open source?

Yes. TDengine is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at taosdata/TDengine and is written mainly in C.

Yes. TDengine is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $970 per month.

Can I self-host TDengine?

Yes. TDengine can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is TDengine an alternative to?

TDengine is an open-source alternative to KX kdb+. Other open-source alternatives to KX kdb+ include InfluxDB, TimescaleDB and QuestDB.

Is TDengine actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to TDengine was on 29 September 2026. The project has 25k stars on GitHub.

TDengine: open-source alternative to KX kdb+

About TDengine

TDengine is an open-source time-series database designed for Internet of Things, connected car and Industrial IoT scenarios. It is built for efficient, real-time ingestion, processing and analysis of very large volumes of sensor data, and the maintainers describe it as cloud native and AI powered.

Rather than assembling a time-series store, a cache, a message queue and a stream processor separately, TDengine includes caching, stream processing, data subscription and AI agent capabilities in a single system, which aims to reduce design complexity and operating cost. It uses a natively distributed design with sharding and partitioning, is queried with SQL, and targets workloads where billions of data collection points report continuously.

TDengine is written in C and licensed under AGPL-3.0, and it can be self-hosted or used through TDengine Cloud, the managed service. Documentation is available in English, Chinese and Japanese. It fits manufacturers, energy and vehicle platforms and monitoring teams that collect high-frequency telemetry and need compact storage and fast queries.

Key features

Time-series storage for IoT data
Built-in caching and stream processing
Data subscription feature
SQL query interface
Distributed sharding and partitioning
TDengine Cloud managed option

Good fit for

→Industrial IoT sensor data
→Connected vehicle telemetry
→Infrastructure and metrics monitoring

Built with: C
Tags: time-series; iot; database; industrial-iot; monitoring; sql; stream-processing; cluster; c-language

TDengine: questions and answers

What is TDengine used for?: TDengine is an open-source, cloud-native time-series database for IoT, connected vehicles and industrial data, with built-in caching, stream processing and data subscription. It is a good fit for industrial IoT sensor data, connected vehicle telemetry, and infrastructure and metrics monitoring.
Is TDengine open source?: Yes. TDengine is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at taosdata/TDengine and is written mainly in C.
Is TDengine free?: Yes. TDengine is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $970 per month.
Can I self-host TDengine?: Yes. TDengine can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is TDengine an alternative to?: TDengine is an open-source alternative to KX kdb+. Other open-source alternatives to KX kdb+ include InfluxDB, TimescaleDB and QuestDB.
Is TDengine actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to TDengine was on 29 September 2026. The project has 25k stars on GitHub.