Best Embedded Software Development Tools in the UK

MATLAB® combines a desktop environment tuned for iterative analysis and design processes with a programming language that expresses matrix and array mathematics directly. It includes the Live Editor for creating scripts that combine code, output, and formatted text in an executable notebook. MATLAB toolboxes are professionally developed, rigorously tested, and fully documented. MATLAB apps let you see how different algorithms work with your data. Iterate until you’ve got the results you want, then automatically generate a MATLAB program to reproduce or automate your work. Scale your analyses to run on clusters, GPUs, and clouds with only minor code changes. There’s no need to rewrite your code or learn big data programming and out-of-memory techniques. Automatically convert MATLAB algorithms to C/C++, HDL, and CUDA code to run on your embedded processor or FPGA/ASIC. MATLAB works with Simulink to support Model-Based Design.

Storyboard is an embedded GUI development framework that accelerates the design and delivery of modern UX for tomorrow’s IoT and wearable devices. With its Rapid Design Import and Iteration Technology, embedded developers around the world are able to create products that offer unmatched GUI experiences (graphics, voice, and audio), uniquely optimized for all operating systems and platforms, including resource-constrained MCU and MPU platforms. Storyboard aligns embedded developers with the iterative change processes of designers — using popular tools like Sketch and Photoshop — helping manufacturers achieve high-quality UX without sacrificing performance or development time. With only a few mouse clicks, developers use Storyboard to visualize changed assets and rapidly assess, accept, or reject elements in a timesaving manner. This accelerated workflow allows teams to refine their products at any stage in their development cycle.

Qt Creator's advanced code editor lets you code in C++, QML, JavaScript, Python and other languages. It features code completion, syntax highlighting, refactoring and has built-in documentation at your fingertips. Qt Creator integrates with most popular version control systems, including Git, subversion, perforce, and mercurial. Integrated visual editors for building C++ widget-based applications or fluid Qt Quick-based animated UIs with ready-made controls. Import an existing project or create one from scratch – Qt Creator generates all the necessary files. Support for Cmake and cross-compiling with qmake is included. Build for and run your software on desktop, mobile and embedded operating systems. The build settings allow you to easily switch between targets. Test and debug applications in conditions practically identical to those on your target device.

LabVIEW offers a graphical programming approach that helps you visualize every aspect of your application, including hardware configuration, measurement data, and debugging. This visualization makes it simple to integrate measurement hardware from any vendor, represent complex logic on the diagram, develop data analysis algorithms, and design custom engineering user interfaces. With LabVIEW and NI DAQ hardware, you can build a custom measurement solution to visualize and analyze real-world signals to make data-driven decisions. Using LabVIEW and NI or third-party hardware, you can automate the validation of your product to meet challenging time-to-market and performance requirements. Working with LabVIEW, you can create flexible test applications that control multiple instruments and design user interfaces to optimize your manufacturing test throughput and operational cost. You can build industrial equipment and smart machines faster with LabVIEW.

P4 (formerly Helix Core) is an enterprise-grade version control system designed to manage the complexities of modern software development. It allows teams to store, track, and manage all digital assets—ranging from source code to 3D models—with unprecedented scalability. P4 is ideal for large, distributed teams working on large-scale projects, offering powerful collaboration tools, seamless integrations, and advanced branching capabilities. With strong support for both centralized and distributed workflows, P4 enhances productivity and efficiency, making it a top choice for software, game, and hardware development teams.

A good ALM tool helps the application lifecycle management of your product. The best ALM tools give you end-to-end traceability across your lifecycle. That’s why development teams across industries choose Perforce ALM (Helix ALM). Perforce ALM is a modular suite of ALM tools. You can use this application lifecycle management suite to trace requirements, tests, and issues. Perforce ALM is the best ALM software for application lifecycle management across the entire lifecycle. Together, this suite of ALM software delivers unparalleled traceability. That means you’ll know if requirements have been tested and met, if test runs have passed (or failed), and if issues have been resolved. Plus, if a requirement changes, you’ll know which test cases and issues will be impacted. Perforce ALM makes it easy to create requirements and share requirements documents. You can do requirements reviews and get approvals — all within the software. Plus, you can even reuse requirements across projects.

The World’s Leading Real-Time Operating System for the Intelligent Edge For nearly 35 years, VxWorks has been used to ensure the security, safety, and reliability you need to design and build mission-critical embedded systems that simply must work. VxWorks® is the industry’s most trusted and widely deployed real-time operating system (RTOS) for mission-critical embedded systems that must be secure and safe. It delivers a proven, real-time, and deterministic runtime combined with a modern approach to development. Regardless of industry or device type, companies building intelligent edge systems rely on the VxWorks pedigree of security, safety, high performance, and reliability. VxWorks is a deterministic, priority-based preemptive RTOS with low latency and minimal jitter. It is built on an upgradable, future-proof architecture to help you rapidly respond to changing market requirements and technology advancements.

Complete development environment for Arm, generating fast, compact code and enabling you to take full control of your code. One Integrated Development Environment with project management tools and editor. Included is 8,400 example projects containing configuration files, code examples and project templates, giving every project a quick start. The IAR C/C++ Compiler is built by our compiler experts and supports C and C++. It offers advanced global and target-specific optimizations, and supports a wide range of industry-standard debug and image formats, compatible with most popular debuggers and emulators, including ELF/DWARF where applicable. Coupled with the complete linker and assembler, it enables powerful building of embedded applications. Support for all 32-bit Arm core from all major vendors and selected 64-bit Arm cores. Our tools are available in a flexible license model to suit your company needs.

For over 30 years, Helix QAC has been the trusted static code analyzer for C and C++ programming languages. With its depth and accuracy of analysis, Helix QAC has been the preferred static code analyzer in tightly regulated and safety-critical industries that need to meet rigorous compliance requirements. Often, this involves verifying compliance with coding standards, such as MISRA and AUTOSAR, and functional safety standards, such as ISO 26262. Helix QAC is certified for functional safety compliance by TÜV-SÜD, including IEC 61508, ISO 26262, EN 50128, IEC 60880, and IEC 62304. In addition, it is also certified in ISO 9001 | TickIT plus Foundation Level, which is one of the most widely adopted standards to ensure that your requirements are not only met but exceeded as well. Prioritize coding issues based on the severity of risk. Helix QAC helps you to target the most critical defects using filters, suppressions, and baselines.

Klocwork static code analysis and SAST tool for C, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript identifies software security, quality, and reliability issues helping to enforce compliance with standards. Built for enterprise DevOps and DevSecOps, Klocwork scales to projects of any size, integrates with large complex environments, a wide range of developer tools, and provides control, collaboration, and reporting for the entire enterprise. This has made Klocwork the preferred static analyzer that keeps development velocity high while enforcing continuous compliance for security and quality. Use Klocwork static application security testing (SAST) for DevOps (DevSecOps). Our security standards identify security vulnerabilities, helping to find and fix security issues early and proving compliance to internationally recognized security standards. Klocwork integrates with CI/CD tools, containers, cloud services, and machine provisioning making automated security testing easy.

NVIDIA's Jetson platform is a leading solution for embedded AI computing, utilized by professional developers to create breakthrough AI products across various industries, as well as by students and enthusiasts for hands-on AI learning and innovative projects. The platform comprises small, power-efficient production modules and developer kits, offering a comprehensive AI software stack for high-performance acceleration. This enables the deployment of generative AI at the edge, supporting applications like NVIDIA Metropolis and the Isaac platform. The Jetson family includes a range of modules tailored to different performance and power efficiency needs, such as the Jetson Nano, Jetson TX2, Jetson Xavier NX, and the Jetson Orin series. Each module is designed to meet specific AI computing requirements, from entry-level projects to advanced robotics and industrial applications.

NVIDIA Isaac is an AI robot development platform that comprises NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated libraries, application frameworks, and AI models to expedite the creation of AI robots, including autonomous mobile robots, robotic arms, and humanoids. The platform features NVIDIA Isaac ROS, a collection of CUDA-accelerated computing packages and AI models built on the open source ROS 2 framework, designed to streamline the development of advanced AI robotics applications. Isaac Manipulator, built on Isaac ROS, enables the development of AI-powered robotic arms that can seamlessly perceive, understand, and interact with their environments. Isaac Perceptor facilitates the rapid development of advanced AMRs capable of operating in unstructured environments like warehouses or factories. For humanoid robotics, NVIDIA Isaac GR00T serves as a research initiative and development platform for general-purpose robot foundation models and data pipelines.

YNQ is a portable SMB server and client stack developed by Visuality Systems, written in ANSI C and designed to run on embedded, IoT, or non-Windows systems while ensuring full interoperability with Windows-based machines. It enables remote file operations (write, edit, copy, delete, update) over a network without needing to transfer entire files locally, while maintaining a small resource footprint ideal for constrained environments. YNQ supports full compatibility across all SMB dialects (from NTLM 0.12 through SMB 3.1.1), including backward compatibility, making it broadly applicable across SMB ecosystems. It offers security features such as Kerberos (domain-join, delegation), NTLM/NTLMv2, message signing, SMB encryption, and pre-authentication integrity. YNQ is modular and comprises four product components; Standalone Client, Corporate Client (with Active Directory registration capability), Standalone Server, and Corporate Server.

Static analysis helps you to find potential issues in your code by doing an analysis on the source code level. C-STAT includes almost 700 checks in total, some comply with rules as defined by MISRA C:2012, MISRA C++:2008 and MISRA C:2004 and more than 250 checks mapping to issues covered by CWE. In addition, it checks compliance with the coding standard CERT C for secure coding. C-STAT executes fast and provides you with comprehensive and detailed error information. You don't need to worry about complex tool setup and struggle with language support and general build issues. C-STAT is completely integrated in the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE and enables you to easy ensure code quality in your daily development flow. It's available for most IAR Embedded Workbench products. Static analysis finds potential issues in code by doing an analysis on the source code level. In addition to raising the code quality, the analysis also aids alignment with industry coding standards.

Automating the creation and deployment of component test harnesses, test stubs and test drivers is a cinch thanks to OneTest Embedded. With a single click from any development environment, one can profile memory and performance, analyze code coverage and visualize program execution behavior. Additionally, OneTest Embedded helps be more proactive in debugging, while identifying and assisting in fixing code before it breaks. Allows for a virtual cycle of test generation, while executing, reviewing and testing improvement to rapidly achieve full test coverage. One click is all it takes to build, execute on the target, and generate reports. Helps preempt performance issues and program crashes. Additionally, can be adapted to work with custom memory management methods used in embedded software. Provides visibility on thread execution and switching to develop a deep understanding of the behavior of the system under test.

Metalware allows engineers to rapidly understand the hardware and write code by combining insights from datasheets and SDKs. We generate an Intermediate Representation (IR) which is a structured data file generated from documents describing a programmable part, containing a register map for HAL generation and device metadata for compiler lookup of device invariants. This IR enables the implementation of the target RTOS or SDK's API by identifying registers and their layout, whether contiguous or FIFO-backed, etc based on the device metadata. Automatically generate implementation code (HAL, header files) for your target RTOS or SDK.

WedoLow is a deep-tech optimization platform for embedded and hosted C/C++ applications, designed to push software performance and efficiency even on constrained hardware. WedoLow analyses source code, identifies performance bottlenecks (CPU load, memory footprint, energy use), and automatically applies algorithmic and architectural optimizations tailored to the target hardware. The core of the offering, the beLow suite, integrates seamlessly with common build systems, so it fits into existing workflows. Once analysis is complete, beLow provides a detailed diagnostic report, classifies optimization opportunities (bit-exact, permissive, or lossy depending on output-value tolerance), and helps teams choose appropriate strategies based on constraints and trade-offs. WedoLow also supports AI-assisted code generation and optimization via its WedoLow MCP Server.