Why OTA-Pulse?

Production firmware OTA is a solved problem — until it isn't. Here's how OTA-Pulse compares to the alternatives, and why we built it anyway.

How OTA-Pulse compares

An honest look at the capabilities that matter most for production embedded fleets.

Feature comparison: OTA-Pulse, Mender, RAUC, and SWUpdate
Capability	OTA-Pulse	Mender	RAUC	SWUpdate
Artifact signing	✓	✓	✓	✓ ¹
Delta updates	✓	✓	~ ²	~ ²
A/B partition rollback	✓	✓	✓	✗ ³
Coredump capture	✓	✗	✗	✗
Multi-tenant RBAC	✓	~ ⁴	✗	✗
MCU support	~ ⁵	✗	✗	~ ⁶
Hosted / cloud offering	✓	✓ ⁷	✗	✗
Open source (OSS) core	✓	~ ⁸	✓	✓

✓ Supported ~ Partial / conditional ✗ Not available

1.: SWUpdate supports PKCS#11 / RSA / ECDSA signing but configuration is manual; no built-in key-management UI.
2.: RAUC and SWUpdate support delta via external casync/bsdiff tools; integration requires extra toolchain setup.
3.: SWUpdate can write to two slots but does not manage boot-flag switching itself; requires a custom U-Boot script or Barebox integration.
4.: Mender RBAC is Enterprise-tier only; the open-source server (mender-server) has no multi-tenant access control.
5.: OTA-Pulse MCU support is on the roadmap (Zephyr RTOS planned); Linux SoC targets are stable today.
6.: SWUpdate has experimental Zephyr DFU support via USB/UART; no hosted management plane.
7.: Mender Hosted is a commercial SaaS; free tier is limited to 10 devices.
8.: Mender's device-side agent is Apache 2.0; the server (mender-server) is SSPL-licensed, which restricts offering it as a hosted service.

OTA-Pulse ships on Linux SoCs today, with RTOS support on the roadmap. Adding a platform to our source of truth makes it appear here automatically.

Linux SoC

arm64 armv7 x86_64

Stable ~2 MB

Linux SoC

arm64 armv7 x86_64

Stable ~2 MB

RTOS

cortex-m

Coming soon ~40 KB

Open source agent · Self-host or cloud · No vendor lock-in