Both LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are excellent — for different jobs. Here’s the short version our customers use to decide.
LoRaWAN
Best for: dense clusters of battery sensors within a few km of a gateway you control — farms, campuses, industrial parks.
- No SIM cards, no monthly cellular fees (you run 1 gateway)
- Excellent battery life (years on lithium)
- Private network — data never leaves your infrastructure
- Limited payload (~50 bytes) and duty-cycle limits — fine for telemetry, not for photos
NB-IoT / Cat-M (cellular)
Best for: scattered points across a city or region, where you can’t install gateways — river gauges, tank levels, road weather.
- Works wherever there’s mobile coverage (deep indoor penetration for NB-IoT)
- SIM costs a few dollars a year on typical telemetry plans
- No infrastructure to own or maintain
Our recommendation
Clusters → LoRaWAN. Scattered → NB-IoT. Mixed → our HFY-GW200 gateways speak both, and both post to the same ThingsBoard dashboards, so you can mix freely.
Tell us your site map and we’ll recommend the network design with costs.