Summary

Knock's top competitors are:

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

• Courier: very similar to Knock with minor differences

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

NotificationAPI

Founded: 2020 (one year before Knock)
Headquarter: Canada
Funding: Independent, Profitable

NotificationAPI focuses on developer experience, which leads to quick and cost-effective notification implementation. NotificationAPI eliminates the need for multiple 3rd-party integrations and provides a dependable customer support experience.

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, as well as A2P 10DLC registration

• Better Pricing: 5 times cheaper than Knock

• Notification Editors: Design and preview notifications for all channels vs. Knock's email-only editor

• 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:

• No custom workflow editor

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

Courier

Founded: 2019 (two years before Knock)
Headquarter: US
Funding: Series B (2022)

Courier's product is almost identical to Knock and they compete mostly on sales and pricing.

Pros:

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

• Multi-channel template editor - Design and preview notifications for all channels vs. Knock's email-only editor

• Internationalization: Available in all plans vs. Knock's enterprise-only internationalization

• EU Region: But only available in the Enterprise plan

Cons:

Courier and Knock share similar flaws due to their similarity.

Novu

Founded: 2021 (same as Knock)
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