Summary

Courier's top competitors are:

• NotificationAPI: 5x better pricing, no need to pay or manage any other third-party integrations

• Knock: very similar to Courier with minor differences

• Novu: open-core model with a strong community of contributors

NotificationAPI

Founded: 2020 (one year after Courier)
Headquarter: Canada
Funding: Independent, Profitable

NotificationAPI focuses on developer experience by eliminating the need for any third-party integrations as opposed to Courier, leading to quicker implementation. Furthermore, NotificationAPI is 5 times cheaper than Courier.

Pros:

• Faster Setup: Built-in notification delivery without the need for third parties such as SendGrid, OneSignal or Twilio

• Compliance: All paid plans include the standard compliance requirements, Google bulk sender policy compliance, and A2P 10DLC registration

• Better Pricing: 5 times cheaper than Courier

• Customization: Supports designing multiple templates for each notification to allow for unlimited localization and branding options

• Better Support: ~1 hour response time during work hours (EST) for any paid plan

• Better Logs: Log APIs & Webhook available in all plans vs. Knock

• EU & Canada Regions: Available at no additional cost

• Fiscally Established: Profitable and not dependent on funding

Cons:

• Fewer integrations, such as Segment and Datadog

• No support for Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or WhatsApp

• No custom workflow editor

Novu

Founded: 2021 (two years after Courier)
Headquarter: Israel
Funding: Seed (2022)

Novu provides many mutual channels and supports similar customization features, but there are notable differences between them. One key difference of Novu is their open-source alternative version of their cloud service.

Pros:

• Open-core & cloud versions: Novu offers an open-source version of their cloud service

• EU Region: Available in the cloud version

• Pricing: Starting at $0.001 per notification, their paid plans are competitively low in price

• Community: Their open-core service supports an active community of contributors

Novu might not fully deliver on your ideal service if you have no interest in their open-source bargaining chip:

Cons:

• Fewer integrations and channels

• Unclear support SLAs

• Novu's open-core version doesn’t contain the same features as their cloud version. We couldn’t find any source for supported features, so you’ll need to do your research on what’s missing.

• No investments since 2022

Knock

Founded: 2021 (two years after Courier)
Headquarter: US
Funding: Series A (2024)

Knock's product is almost identical to Courier and they compete mostly on sales and pricing with no known pros.

Cons:

• Fewer channels

• Fewer template editing capabilities

• Internationalization is only available in Enterprise

• EU region is not supported