IoT Sharing
Hand a dashboard to a friend, a family member, or a teammate. They see exactly the widgets you built — and can push the buttons — without gaining access to your IoT Parrot account. Their app does connect to your MQTT broker with your credentials, so share with people you trust.
Hobby+ Dashboard sharing is available on the Hobby, Maker, and Pro tiers. See Account & billing for how the tiers compare.
Sharing is scoped to a single dashboard. The recipient never gains access to your account, your other dashboards, or any device or broker that this dashboard's widgets don't reference. To share more than one dashboard, share each one. (Scoping at the MQTT broker is separate — the recipient's app connects to your broker with your credentials.)
Inviting someone
You invite a recipient by their email address, and they must already have an IoT Parrot account under that email. Sharing doesn't send a sign-up link — if the person you want to share with hasn't registered yet, ask them to create a free account first at app.iotparrot.com.
- Open the dashboard you want to share and open its share dialog.
- Enter the recipient's account email and send the invitation.
- The recipient receives a pending invitation they can review and accept.
Accepting an invitation
Nothing appears on the recipient's home until they accept — an invitation is an offer, not an automatic grant.
- The recipient opens their invitations list (in their devices / invitations area) and accepts the pending invite.
- Once accepted, the dashboard shows up under "Shared with me" on their home screen.
- From there they can open it like any of their own dashboards, and optionally set it as their default dashboard.
What recipients can see and do
Every share is read-write: recipients can view the dashboard and interact with its widgets — flip toggles, drag sliders, tap buttons, read gauges. (An older read-only sharing option was removed; all shares now grant control.)
Access is deliberately narrow. A recipient can only see:
- The dashboard you shared.
- The devices that this dashboard's widgets reference.
- The brokers those devices sit on — just enough to make the widgets work.
They cannot enumerate your other devices, brokers, dashboards, schedules, or alerts inside IoT Parrot. Editing the dashboard's layout and creating new content stays with you, the owner. Access at the MQTT broker level is coarser, though — read the next section before you share.
Behind the scenes, accepting a share grants the recipient transitive read access only to the devices and brokers referenced by the shared dashboard's widgets. That mapping is maintained server-side and updates automatically when you change which devices a dashboard uses — so if a widget stops pointing at a device, the recipient's access to it goes away with it.
Recipients receive your broker credentials
A shared dashboard isn't proxied — the recipient's app talks to your MQTT broker directly. To do that it needs to log in, so accepting a share hands the recipient's app the connection details for the broker(s) the dashboard uses: host, port, username, and password.
Two consequences worth understanding before you invite someone:
- Broker access is broader than the dashboard. Those credentials are your broker account, not a per-dashboard key. Someone holding them can connect with any MQTT client and read or publish on any topic your broker account permits — including devices that have nothing to do with the dashboard you shared.
- Revoking doesn't rotate the password. Revoking a share stops IoT Parrot from serving the dashboard, but a credential the recipient already has keeps working against your broker until you change it.
If you need to be certain a former recipient can no longer reach your broker: revoke the share, then change the password on the broker itself and update it in Brokers. Your own devices and any remaining shares will need the new password too, so plan the swap.
If a broker carries devices you wouldn't want a recipient touching, put shared dashboards on a separate broker (or a separate broker account with its own credentials) instead. Many hosted MQTT services let you create additional users with restricted topic permissions — that's the cleanest way to share narrowly today.
Revoking access
You stay in control. As the owner you can revoke a share at any time from the dashboard's share dialog. Once revoked, the dashboard disappears from the recipient's "Shared with me" list and their transitive access to the referenced devices and brokers is withdrawn. Revoking never affects the recipient's own dashboards or devices.
Remember that revocation is an IoT Parrot-side action: it does not invalidate broker credentials the recipient's app already received. See Recipients receive your broker credentials.
A shared dashboard doesn't proxy through IoT Parrot — each recipient's app connects directly to your MQTT broker to drive the widgets. That means every active recipient counts as an additional client against your broker's connection limits. If you plan to share a dashboard widely, make sure your broker can handle the extra concurrent connections, and size its plan accordingly. See Brokers.
Managed-broker dashboards can't be shared
Dashboards whose widgets live on the IoT Parrot managed broker cannot be shared. The managed broker issues a separate MQTT username and password per device, and those per-device credentials aren't shareable to another account — so there's no safe way to let a recipient connect.
If you want to share a dashboard, build it on devices attached to a bring-your-own (BYO) broker rather than the managed one. A BYO broker uses credentials you control, so recipients can connect to it directly. See Brokers to set one up.