A Particle alternative you own — open-source, on your Cloudflare account

In January 2026, Digi International acquired Particle for $50 million and began folding it into its OEM Solutions business. The platform keeps running, but the direction is now set by enterprise device programs, not the community Particle itself puts at a quarter-million developers — the people who grew up on Spark Cores, Photons, and Argons. If you’re one of them and reassessing, the honest first question isn’t “what replaces Particle” — it’s which Particle you were using.

nodrix replaces one of them well: the Wi-Fi one. It’s open source (MIT), you deploy it to your own Cloudflare account in one click, and devices talk plain HTTPS/WebSocket — telemetry up, control writes down, dashboards, automations, and a read API, all in your tenancy with no vendor cloud to be acquired out from under you.

The two Particles

Particle is really two products under one SDK:

• A managed cellular fleet platform — SIMs and carrier relationships across hundreds of networks, Device OS, OTA updates, fleet health. This is what Digi bought, it’s genuinely good, and there is no drop-in open-source substitute. If your devices live on cellular in the field, nodrix is not your answer, and this page won’t pretend otherwise.
• A friendly Wi-Fi prototyping cloud — Particle.publish from a Photon or Argon on your bench, a console to watch events, functions you call remotely, webhooks into the rest of the internet. This is how most makers actually used Particle, and it’s the part that maps cleanly onto nodrix.

Particle vs nodrix, honestly

When Particle is still the better choice

• Your devices are on cellular. Managed SIMs, carrier fallback, and fleet connectivity are the hard part of that world, and Particle does it properly.
• You depend on fleet OTA — staged firmware rollouts across hundreds of field units.
• You’re an OEM building a product line and the Digi direction is a feature for you, not a concern: enterprise support contracts and a hardware-to-cloud vendor relationship.

When nodrix fits better

• Your boards are on Wi-Fi — the bench, the house, the workshop, the campus — and the cellular machinery was never the part you used.
• You want out of the acquisition business entirely: the stack is MIT-licensed and runs in your own Cloudflare account, so there is no platform owner whose strategy can change your project.
• You want costs that track usage, not seats or devices — no subscription, no per-device fee.
• You’d rather have dashboards and automations included than build a UI against a console.

Moving a project across

The firmware shape survives the move — Particle’s model of events up, functions down maps directly:

#include <Nodrix.h>

NODRIX_WRITE("led") {                        // was: Particle.function("led", ...)
  digitalWrite(LED_PIN, value.asBool());
}

void setup() {
  pinMode(LED_PIN, OUTPUT);
  Nodrix.begin(WIFI_SSID, WIFI_PASS, HOST, TOKEN);
}

void loop() {
  Nodrix.run();

  static unsigned long last = 0;
  if (millis() - last >= 30000) {
    last = millis();
    Nodrix.send("temperature", readTemp());  // was: Particle.publish("temperature", ...)
  }
}

The hardware usually moves too: Particle boards are built around Device OS and the Particle cloud, so the pragmatic path is a standard ESP32-class board — a few dollars, the same Arduino toolchain, and no platform assumptions baked into the silicon. The full firmware walkthrough, TLS pinning included, is in Connect an ESP32 over HTTPS. Webhook-style glue — “when this event, call that service” — recreates as trigger-condition-action automations with Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, or plain HTTP actions.

The bottom line

If Particle’s cellular fleet machinery is your product’s backbone, stay and watch how the Digi integration lands. If Particle was your friendly Wi-Fi cloud, the acquisition is a good moment to own the stack instead: deploy nodrix to your Cloudflare account, point one ESP32 at it, and the part of Particle you actually used is yours now, in your own account.