Third-party notification services are a quick and effective solution when implementing essential communications to your project. Relying on established notification infrastructure versus building your own is an effective way to cut down on time and resources while ensuring you have the notifications you need.

If you’re looking for a notification solution for your current project, there’s a great selection of services to choose from. When considering your options for a 3rd-party notification service, it’s important to compare each option’s features, cost, and reliability.

Summary

The table below highlights the high-level comparison of Knock and the alternatives we provide:

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Knock

Founded in 2021, the U.S.-based company Knock brings valuable customization features in its multi-tenant support, channel options, and workflow editor. These provide meaningful methods to design your notification system with detail in mind.

• Channel coverage - Email, Text, Voice, In-App, Push, Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Discord

• Multi-tenant support - Allowing you to account for separate user groups

• Complex workflow editor - Featuring intelligent cross-channel routing & conditional sending

• Automations - Batching, scheduling and throttling

Knock supports helpful features for fine-tuning your notifications, however, Knock’s cost and lack of defined support are reasons to consider alternatives for your notification service.

• Pay and manage your own channel integrations, e.g. SendGrid, Twilio

• Paid plans start at $0.005 per notification, and do not include your 3rd party channel costs

• Their template editor only supports email notifications

• Little-to-no information about options for customer support

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Novu

Israel-based service Novu was founded in 2021 and while they provide many mutual channels and support similar customization features, there are notable differences between them. One key difference of Novu is their open-core (open-source alternative) version of their cloud service.

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

• 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

If you’re looking for an open-core solution, Novu has you covered. If this feature isn’t for you, it's important to keep their downsides in mind:

• Channel Differences - Novu supports most of the same channels as Knock, but doesn't provide support for WhatsApp

• Raw HTML editor - While their editor does have button & text templates, its features are fairly limited and Knock’s editors offer more options for email customization

• Customer support's estimated 2 day response time is at least transparent, but may be longer than you'd hope for

• Their open-core and cloud versions don't share all the same features. While we couldn't find a source for key differences, you should make sure you have access to any features you need

Courier

Courier, founded in 2019 is U.S.-based and is one of the first services. They offer the widest range of options for notification channels and compete with Knock’s customization features by providing similar notification management capabilities and a more diverse template editor.

• More channels - Provides everything Knock does, and more: Facebook Messenger, On-Call alerts

• Multi-channel template editor - Allows for designing notification templates for any channel, versus Knock’s email-only editor

• As-seen notification preview - Preview notifications as seen by users via logs, compared to Knock's raw data only

While Courier is well established in notifications, they share similar flaws with Knock, along with more features restricted to their most expensive plan.

• Minimal customer support outside their enterprise plan - Only a community forum is offered for free and Pro plans.

• Pro plan doesn’t offer many new features compared to their free tier, meaning any features not provided by free plans will still be locked behind their enterprise plan

• Expensive White-labeling - Removing Courier branding requires an enterprise plan, compared to Knock’s white-labeling being accessible in their Starter plan

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NotificationAPI

We founded NotificationAPI in 2020 and are based in Canada. Our focus on developer experience leads us to provide a quick and cost-effective notification service by eliminating 3rd-party integrations and providing a dependable customer support experience

• Fastest Setup - No need to set up 3rd party channels, we’ve got you covered

• Pricing - Notifications start at $0.001 each - No 3rd parties means no other plans to manage

• Dependable customer support - ~1 Business hour response time (EST), available through Email, Chat, Slack, Discord, or Call

• Multi-channel template editor - Design your notifications for each of your channels, not just email

• As-seen notification preview - Preview notifications as seen by users via logs

• More Automation features - Includes features such as digest & deduplication in addition to batching, scheduling, and throttling

NotificationAPI delivers on many important features, though we don’t have everything just yet:

• No workflow editor - Straightforward notification workflows without conditional sending or delays

• We currently do not support open & click tracking

• We do not support notifications via alternative chat channels - Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc.

 *We’re looking forward to delivering on many of these in 2025!