I am a student who just started working on a research project, which is to compare Kaa with Eclipse Kura. I don't have any knowledge about IoT before working this project, so I got really lost and had no idea how to compare them. Hope someone can give me some advice. Thanks!
I cannot speak to the specifics of Kaa, so you would need to thoroughly review their documentation. From my understanding, Kaa is mainly focused on the Cloud side of the IoT stack. They provide SDKs for various languages that you need to compile and install on whatever device you intend to connect to the Cloud.
Eclipse Kura is a Java/OSGi framework that runs on an IoT gateway. The framework provides built in services for managing the gateway (networking, cloud connectivity, remote management, etc.) and abstracts away many of the complexities in writing applications for the gateway (GPIO, serial, BLE, etc.). Eclipse Kura doesn't provide a Cloud backend itself, but has built in support for connecting to open source platforms such as Eclipse Kapua and industrial backends such as Eurotech Everyware Cloud, Amazon AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, etc. In theory you could install the Kaa Java SDK in Eclipse Kura and have Kura connect to Kaa, but I have never tried this.
I hope this helps,
--Dave