Courier Alternatives - Notification infrastructure
Tags: courier, webdev, notification, devtool
Published: 2024-03-30 16:53:32

In today's fast-paced digital world, efficient communication with users is paramount for businesses and developers alike. Notification infrastructure platforms play a crucial role in enabling developers to build multichannel notification experiences seamlessly into their products. 

While Courier maybe the first entrant to this space, there are few other notification infrastructure alternatives that offer better capabilities and pricing options.

In this article, I'll compare few notification infrastructure players such as Courier, Knock, Engagespot, Novu and Suprsend and their pros and cons.

## Courier

Courier is a leading notification infrastructure platform renowned for its robust API and developer-friendly approach, allowing developers to easily integrate notifications into their applications.

**Pros**

- Comprehensive support for a wide range of channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, and more.
- Support for lot of providers and integrations
- More financial stability with Series B funding backed by large players [like Twilio](https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/14/courier-raises-10-1m-series-a-to-help-developers-integrate-multi-channel-notifications/).

**Cons**

- Their offering seems to be more targeted towards enterprises. 
- Their free and developer tier lacks most of the features, and everything is hidden behind the enterprise label whose price is not transparent.
- Developer experience is not that great


Website: [Courier](https://courier.com)


## Knock

Knock is another prominent player in the notification infrastructure space, offering a suite of tools to streamline the delivery of personalized notifications across web and mobile platforms.

**Pros**

- [Developer friendliness](https://knock.app/knock-vs-courier-comparison). Their commit feature enables developers to follow their source version control process for the notification workflows too.
- Advanced workflow capabilities like Throttling
- Multiple In-App channels if required.

**Cons**

- No hosted preference center.
- No message status synchronization across web and mobile inboxes
- No support for web push notifications

Website: [Knock](https://knock.app/)

## Engagespot

Engagespot is another notification infrastructure platform designed to simplify the process of delivering notifications across various channels, including web browsers, mobile apps, and email.

**Pros**
- Supports [actionable in-app notification](https://engagespot.co/notification-uikit) with state transitions.
- Ease of use for developers
- Charges only for notification triggers instead of individual channels
- Supports built-in providers for email, sms and web-push
- Self-hosting

**Cons**
- No tenancy
- Limited workflow capabilities

Website: [Engagespot](https://engagespot.co)

## Novu

Novu is an [open-source notification infrastructure](https://github.com/novuhq/novu) that stands out with its focus on providing real-time, contextual notifications to enhance user engagement and retention.

**Pros**
- Opensource community
- Self-hosting

**Cons**
- Limited features
- No webhook channel

Website: [Novu](https://novu.co)


## SuprSend

SuprSend prides itself on offering a lightweight and developer-friendly notification platform. SuprSend expands its coverage by offering integration with Teams, Slack, Segment, Mixpanel, and your native data warehouse through its tool called Bifrost - a superior Courier alternative.

**Pros**
- Better support for in-app notifications.
- More library integrations
- Cost effective

**Cons**
- Limited workflow capabilities

Website: [SuprSend](https://suprsend.com)