--- title: Nucleus RTOS Reviews meta_title: 'Nucleus RTOS Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 24 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Nucleus RTOS works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.2 review_count: 24 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-05-05' parent_category: name: IoT Management url: https://www.g2.com/categories/iot-management --- # Nucleus RTOS Reviews **Vendor:** Siemens Digital Industries Software **Category:** [IoT Operating Systems](https://www.g2.com/categories/iot-operating-systems) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 24 ## About Nucleus RTOS The Nucleus RTOS is deployed in over 3 billion devices and provides a highly scalable micro-kernel based real-time operating system designed for scalability and reliability. System reliability can be improved using lightweight memory partitioning support that can function with or without MMU/MPU assisted protection in systems spanning the range of aerospace, industrial, and medical applications. Developers can make full use of multi-core solutions across the spectrum of Microcontroller and Microprocessor SoCs using SMP and AMP configurations to integrate multiple operating systems. To meet the power requirements of todays advanced designs, engineers can ease development with integrated power management in Nucleus that includes support for DVFS, deep sleep modes, and power/clock gating. ## Nucleus RTOS Reviews ### 1. Nucleus RTOS Review for the designing of smart systems. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sobin T. | Device Driver Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Best part is it modularity and the support for priority inheritance. The entire system is modularized and this helps in easy porting to different Modules. The file system provided by the nucleus was good in the sense it supported the Power fail system it was very important for the embedded system and this helped in saving the contents when the power goes and this helped us a lot. Also the drivers were cleanly written and the test cases was very easy to develop. There was also support for the IOT based system where the support for POSIX was there. When you have support for POSIX this means your software will readily blend to it , Most of the the software is written in linux and this means that the Code will inherently ready to blend with the Nucleus RTOS Nucleus SmartFit from Mentor Graphics Corporation is a binary version of the Nucleus RTOS optimized to fit the limited internal memory of 32-bit MCUs. Nucleus SmartFit includes Sourcery CodeBench development tools and provides developers with broad connectivity and power consumption options for developing products based on 32-bit MCUs. Included in the Nucleus RTOS is the Power Management Framework with which developers can maximize battery life in power-efficient applications. In addition to Sourcery CodeBench development tools, the Nucleus SmartFit platform can be configured to include I/O and bus support, file systems, networking IPv4/IPv6, wireless, and USB functionality. The Nucleus SmartFit product is suited for medical and personal healthcare, smart grid, industrial sensors, and white goods products.. Open source toolchain experts providing toolchain commercialization, customization and support services enabling a wide variety of processor architectures and HPC accelerator offload support for over 20 years -> High-quality open source commercial grade toolchains GCC and LLVM based customized compilers and libraries High Performance Computing enablement including accelerator offload support for GPU, multicore CPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and custom accelerators **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** The Debug agent is a bit slow and this creates problem. The BDI Agent provided is not that efficient. The Boot loader provided by the Nucleus was not that easy to work with. We had to use trace 32 for this purpose and they will promote use to use the BDI agent please dont go with that. The Debug agent is a bit slow and this creates problem. The BDI Agent provided is not that efficient. The Boot loader provided by the Nucleus was not that easy to work with. We had to use trace 32 for this purpose and they will promote use to use the BDI agent please dont go with that. The Debug agent is a bit slow and this creates problem. The BDI Agent provided is not that efficient. The Boot loader provided by the Nucleus was not that easy to work with. We had to use trace 32 for this purpose and they will promote use to use the BDI agent please dont go with that. The Debug agent is a bit slow and this creates problem. The BDI Agent provided is not that efficient. The Boot loader provided by the Nucleus was not that easy to work with. We had to use trace 32 for this purpose and they will promote use to use the BDI agent please dont go with that. The Sourcery code bench is a bit slow and this is not useful for debugging unlike the one given by the qNX The RTOS was bit failed in priority inversion tests. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used Nucleus RTOS against QNX for cost point of view and on comparison for the basic sattelite phones both fared same The problems included the Priority control for the threads running in the system and how to deal with it. There were lot of drivers that need to be ported and we had a mentor graphics team delivering that this helped a lot. They had dedicated customer care teeam that helped in giving the drivers and the BSP packages to us. Also the drivers were clean written and we had to just port them and use them The test code we had to write using the drivers that was given to us. Using OpenACC to exploit application parallelism with minimal effort Extensive architecture support including Arm®, RISC-V, MIPS®, and POWER® Integrated development tools with Eclipse-Based IDE Support for rich UI graphics File system support for many of the leading format types Multicore Support includes xAMP and SMP support with rpmspg over virtIO and MCAPI for inter-process communication POSIX support for application portability ### 2. Usage of Nucleus RTOS in safety critical systems in Avionics and Automotive industry **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** sharmith j. | Project Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 05, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** I had used Nucleus RTOS in Validating the Power distribution system in Aerospace industry . And also currently using it in a Embedded (Electric drive) field. There are few points for which i felt it as one of the best in market . It supports Power PC architecture, which was used in our project secondary power distribution assembly of an aircraft. Nucleus is used to provide an environment to allow multiple tasks toexecute on a single CPU which includes providing a system where time (task execution) and space (memory) are partitioned to allow different levels of criticality software to be independent.. It also provides inter-task communication in an atomic fashion. As it is lightweight it is easy to use for a space partitioning system. one more major plus point is it works well with all mainly used embedded architecture which is important for a system to fit in any environment if in case any future changes required. The latest Nucleus supports advanced UI features and the optimized code of the framework helps in faster debugging. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** For any product improvisation is very important which comes as the time moves on. As we all know the future of embedded systems is IOT as of now . Apart from it i dont have any dislikes in this as of now but yes in future lot of improvements will come. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Many people have started using it for a next generation systems which tells the story about it.The future of complex systems require RTOS like this. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Nucleus is a safety-certified, real-time operating system (RTOS) . As we had used old version Nucleus in previous projects now we are upgrading this with the latest Nucleus plus where the power management system is built in which is an advantage. Based on the connectivity, communication and cloud i feel IOT plays a major role which also might hinder some of the regular RTOS. ### 3. Broad support of different hardware architecture **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Naveed R. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Nucleus has a broad set of BSPs available off the shelf that will help you to reduce time to market for your product. The driver support is also rich and contain all peripheral driver e.g. UART, I2C, SPI, Gyroscope, CRC engine, interrupt controllers, PLLs, ethernet, NAND \ NOR flashes, CAN, LIN, Touch panel and display etc. Even if you have a custom board, the drivers are super easy to develop because driver interface is highly influenced by baremetal development mind set. Nucleus support different hardware architectures e.g. ARM, PowerPC, MIPS and many more. Apart from that Nucleus latency time is very short. The scheduling latency is as low as 6 usec which makes it favorable for time critical applications. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** The software stack of Nucleus is a bit complex and can be buggy. There has to be a simpler, more efficient software stack to develop IOT based products. The reason for complexity is the need to develop a software stack that fits the broad portfolio of Nucleus based products like MEMF, Hypervisor etc. but in most cases it is not required by user. The process model support is also not very mature. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** I would advise to use safety certified version of Nucleus if you could because it is much more simpler then standard Nucleus RTOS. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used Nucleus for software development of network switch. To meet my timing requirements, I by passed Nucleus network software stack and it was super easy to do that using simpler driver / stack implementation. Further benefits include better throughput and symmetric multi processing support. ### 4. Best Choice for Medical Instrumentation. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** ARUN JOE C. | Senior Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 03, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** The power management options available are excellent and go in hand with many of the advanced MCUs and MPUs. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Requirements to run the kernel is pretty heavy, a Beta version would plug this gap. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Developer mostly chooses a simple Kernel. Nucleus RTOS would appear heavy, however it could be the one that bring out complete capability of your MCU. It would be a best choice for Medical Instrumentation or any similar applications involving long running algorithms that are complex. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I built an entire medical diagnostic device with Nucleus RTOS, which had multiples tasks running DSP algorithms relating to Cardiology and other parameters, The low power management was good when the device was made portable. ### 5. Thin yet feature rich RTOS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Wireless | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** We had used nucleus RTOS for our 2G/3G/4G protocol stack Development. I felt the code is written in an optimized manner and easy to understand.it was very easy to make our protocol stack run on top of nucleus RTOS. Multicore support with SMP helped us to structure our protocol stack and distribute the tasks to different cores so that we could achieve minimum latency. Memory footprint was very small compared to other Free open source Rtos's available. We were developing our own RTOS (to reduce the licensing complications ) Nuclues RTOS helped us very much to clearly understand how to design and develop an RTOS from scratch. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** We had used Nuclues RTOS back in 2012 to 2015, to be honest we dint find anything to dislike about it,it included all the features which were necessary for our product,it has evolved a lot from then. It includes IOT framework support with which the possibilities are endless. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** It's a fairly simple and easy to understand RTOS yet it include variety of feature sets such as multicore support,IOT framework support,support for Various BSP'S. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had used it for our 2G/3G/4G protocol stack development , it provided the support of all features which were necessary to design and develop low latency high speed stack. ### 6. RTOS for critical systems **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Easy to understand and easy to use the APIs provided. Size of library is small as it does not include complete concepts of generic OS. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Nucleus is perfectly structured. no need for changes **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used for automotive infotainment applications where the fast response is highly important. Prioritizing the tasks and providing the time slice to every task by using provided APIs is very helpful. Also, synchronization for the different tasks that are developed on one core is perfectly achieved with locking mechanisms. I used counting semaphore. Efficient usage of memory is also achieved. ### 7. Awesome RTOS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Roland L. | Senior Embed Software Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** It’s user manual is self explanatory so that anyone can understand and use the RTOS services efficiently.. it’s memory foot print is also less and its best suitable for embedded application development **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Profiling statistics could be better and brief **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Definitely **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have ported our application stack compatible with Nucleus RTOS and we achieved the better performance ### 8. NUCLEUS is good if you are looking for a multithreaded RTOS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** It has full stack for both networking and USB. Smooth switching between threads and context switching. Well defined API's. Got good support team **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** The only problem I seen is at the time I work on this it don't have full pledged wirless stack support. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** If you are looking at good power saving products which need a multi threading then you can choose this blindly **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am working for a IOT project and it helped me alot in power management and networking stack stuff ### 9. Easy to Understand **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2019 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Its layered Architecture makes easy for users to do understand and implement features **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Need to provide simple way of module access through APIs **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** I do recommend this to other.. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used the RTOS in Earlier Mobile platform for feature phones ### 10. Nucleus RTOS for commercial products **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Nucleus RTOS is a well designed RTOS and is properly supported by excellent documentation. Have been using this RTOS for past 9 years on embedded infotainment products. Would recommend this RTOS for embedded products. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** For UI had to use customize designed UI Framework. Felt lagged to support for rich UI framework with performance, but I hope mentor graphics might have supported in the latest versions of Nucleus RTOS **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** For embedded products for faster development and performance with standard UI requirement Nucleus RTOS fits in the bill **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Nucleus RTOS helped in achieving Good System Performance and Faster product deliveries ### 11. Nucleus RTOS for embedded systems **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dr . Keshava M. | Vice President, SecDB Engineering, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 03, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** its simple kernel, high performance well suited for ARM based SOCs **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** it requires lot more tools; when i was working on it lot of features were learned by trail and erros **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** great performance, simpler memory management with static pools. ### 12. Nucleus RTOS - 1st RTOS I Used with Source Code in early 90's **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John C. W. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 09, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Deterministic behavior. Programming real-time tasks. Most/all features that should be available in a modern RTOS. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** No downside at all - this won't let me type anything shorter than this. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Great RTOS - especially having the source code so customizations can be made - if necessary. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1st project was ISDN Terminal adapter on the AMD SYS-29K. Timing was critical - hence needing the RTOS. ### 13. Quadcopter using Nucleus RTOS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zeeshan M. | Automation Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Its very flexible and extremely efficient. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** None that I saw. Its exactly as per our requirements. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Its a bit expensive but worth the money that you pay for. I have used it for quadcopter applications. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We made a quadcopter software for controlling x y and z axis for our quadcopter. ### 14. Easy to understand the code of nucleus rtos **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** venkat k. | Deputy General Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Code structure is simple to understand. And debugging is easy in nucleus rtos. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Runtime execution is slower, that's why latency is little slower. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using for iot solution. Code modification are easy, as nucleus rtos code readability is good. ### 15. An extremely robust OS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** It is reliable in scheduling just like other RTOS however Nucleus, in my tests, has been much more stable and robust against bugs. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** It could use more dev add ons and apps. Things like a GUI. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using it for a digital speedometer. It is safety certified which makes it very reliable for safety critical apps. ### 16. Used Nucleus for STB (Set Top Box) product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** I was in a IC design company at that time and we want to find the RTOS for STB project. Nucleus is light and easy to port to different core, like ARM, MIPS or even SPARC. And we had successfully integrated with different STB middleware that also with mass production. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** The document for API usage and porting is not clear enough. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We definitely need the good response time and light ROTS support in our STB project. It is really good at that. ### 17. Lightweight and easy to use **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Semiconductors | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 28, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Nucleus RTOS is lightweight and easy to use/understand. I used it around 15 years ago for developing packet filtering applications. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** As compared to Linux, the community support and knowledge base is inferior. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Nucleus RTOS was used on a CO side DSLAM product in my usage. I added POSIX support for application . ### 18. Can have stability issues based on the board you're using. Documentation not very extensive either. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Its reasonably easy to understand and debug (by static analysis or JTAG) **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Lack of Documentation is a huge problem. Can have stability issues based on your board and device drivers. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Use other open source alternatives like Linux or Zephyr. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not a lot. I've mostly been involved in writing BSPs for the OS which has been a reasonably good experience. ### 19. Best RTOS with awesome product support and with source code availability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** The design of internals as well as provided APIs is highly polished and the source code availability makes the development of users a lot easier than competitors. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Doesn't support the 4G/5G technology and older architectures like MIPS etc **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Best support and new feature development packages with tight deadlines **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used it for RISC-V architecture evaluation. Porting took a really short time because of its design. ### 20. Great pick for Iot and all real time systems **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Medical Devices | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** I was using Nucleus RTOS. It give more easy to use APIs to interact with hardware. We are able to configure all communication protocols with ease **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** We where using qt for front end.. some limitations to bundle both **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** It suitable for all your real time systems **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able establish UART i2c i2s with easy APIs provided by RTOS. And task creation and management is easy ### 21. Its a good RTOS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 04, 2021 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** It works reliably. There was not much bugs I faced. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Interface can be make more easy to use (in apis) **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Add more features ### 22. Lightweight RTOS for Embedded applications **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** TI Ecosto Mobile platform was designed for Ultra low cost applications and Nucleus was an ideal choice due to its ight weight Kernel and rich RTOS feature set. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** It was long back I have used it nothing as far as I remembered, looked at latest release and it has got support for multi platforms. **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Embedded applications ### 23. Fastest time to market hard and cost effective RTOs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Fastest boot time,microsecond latency, small memory footprint. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** diagnostic and error checking feature can be more elaborate **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Cost effective , more scalable , reliable for industrial and consumer electronic industry **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Memory leak ### 24. Amazing light weight OS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2020 **What do you like best about Nucleus RTOS?** Size of the operating system, customisation. **What do you dislike about Nucleus RTOS?** Code samples, documentation, on line user forums. **Recommendations to others considering Nucleus RTOS:** Try it **What problems is Nucleus RTOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Telephone application ## Nucleus RTOS Discussions - [What is nucleus programming?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-nucleus-programming) - [What types of specific systems use VxWorks embedded real time OS?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-types-of-specific-systems-use-vxworks-embedded-real-time-os) - [What is Deos RTOS?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-deos-rtos) - [View Nucleus RTOS pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/nucleus-rtos/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-26+06%3A50%3A39+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=aa8cc640-e5c9-481d-b57c-8fd0fc9abd6a&secure%5Btoken%5D=13ec227945b3ca564a10d3bd12f9b482291113df35b97bb5ed24ae66ac449a3b&format=llm_user) ## Nucleus RTOS Features **Security** - Access Controls - Network Security - Compliance - Cryptography ## Top Nucleus RTOS Alternatives - [Amazon FreeRTOS](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-freertos/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (12 reviews) - [TinyOS](https://www.g2.com/products/tinyos/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (24 reviews) - [Red Hat Enterprise Linux](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (932 reviews)