Courier vs Pushwoosh
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in Notification Infrastructure for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCourier compared with Pushwoosh
Pushwoosh meters per monthly active user with unlimited push and in-app messages, free up to 1,000 MAU and $7 per 1,000 MAU on push only, so apps that message the same users often can pay less than Courier's per-send price; Courier remains stronger for routing transactional notifications through providers a team already uses.
Pushwoosh compared with Courier
Courier meters per send, at $0.005 after 10,000 free sends a month, and routes through providers you already use. Pushwoosh meters per monthly active user and delivers push itself, with unlimited push and in-app messages inside the price. Courier suits teams sending moderate volumes of transactional notifications across their existing providers; Pushwoosh suits apps that message the same users often, where a per-MAU price with unlimited push is cheaper.
Choose Courier if
Engineering teams at product companies who already pay for SendGrid, Twilio, or Firebase and want an orchestration layer over them, particularly mixed teams where a non-developer needs to own the message content without filing tickets.
Choose Pushwoosh if
Consumer mobile apps and content or ecommerce websites (games, media, delivery, fintech, subscription apps) that want mobile and web push, in-app messages, and lifecycle journeys on one predictable per-MAU bill, with a genuinely usable free tier up to 1,000 monthly active users.
Side by side
17 attributes| Attribute | Courier | Pushwoosh |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Notifications | Notifications |
| Starting price | $0 (Developer, 10,000 sends per month), then $0.005 per send | $0 up to 1,000 MAU, then $7 per 1,000 MAU (Push only, limited offer) or $13 per 1,000 MAU (Omnichannel) |
| Pricing model | Pure usage-based pricing on notifications sent, with no per-seat fee and no channel add-on charges, plus a free monthly allowance and a quoted enterprise tier with volume discounts. | Pay-as-you-go, metered on monthly active users (anyone messaged on any channel in the month, deduplicated by user ID). Free up to 1,000 MAU. Three self-serve plans differ only by channel: Push only, Omnichannel, and Email only. No feature gating between plans. Custom plan once the estimated bill exceeds $3,000 a month. No annual toggle is published. |
| Free plan | Developer includes 10,000 notification sends per month across email, push, SMS, in-app, and chat. | Free while the project stays within 1,000 monthly active users, with every feature included and no credit card required. |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the Developer plan is permanently free within its send allowance | No |
| Best for | Engineering teams at product companies who already pay for SendGrid, Twilio, or Firebase and want an orchestration layer over them, particularly mixed teams where a non-developer needs to own the message content without filing tickets. | Consumer mobile apps and content or ecommerce websites (games, media, delivery, fintech, subscription apps) that want mobile and web push, in-app messages, and lifecycle journeys on one predictable per-MAU bill, with a genuinely usable free tier up to 1,000 monthly active users. |
| Setup time | An afternoon to a first notification in production: connect a provider, design a template, call the API. Migrating an existing notification service takes one to two sprints and is usually done one notification type at a time. | The vendor says the SDK integrates in about 15 minutes and a typical production rollout, including importing users and gathering push subscribers, takes 2 to 10 days. Web push can go live with a snippet, npm package, or Google Tag Manager plus a hosted service worker. |
| Learning curve | Low. The core concepts (providers, templates, routing, preferences, automations) map closely to how teams already think about notifications, and the visual designer means content people onboard in minutes rather than days. | Moderate. Sending a campaign is quick, but the Customer Journey Builder, RFM segments, Liquid templates, and event taxonomy take a few weeks to use well. Marketers can run most of it without code once developers have instrumented events. |
| Platforms | Web dashboard, REST API, React and JavaScript components, iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter SDKs | iOS, Android (FCM, Huawei HMS, Amazon ADM), Web push (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Samsung Internet), iOS and iPadOS PWAs (Safari 16.4+), Flutter, React Native, Unity, Cordova, Expo, MAUI .NET, OutSystems SDKs, Web dashboard |
| Compliance | SOC 2, GDPR | ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, GDPR and ePrivacy, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (with UK extension and Swiss DPF) |
| Founded | 2019 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Fairfax, Virginia, United States (contact address in the website privacy policy); fully distributed team |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Not disclosed on the vendor site |
| Free tier volume | 10,000 sends per month | Up to 1,000 monthly active users, all features, no card |
| First paid tier | $0.005 per send, with no monthly floor above the free tier | $7 per 1,000 MAU (Push only, limited offer); $13 per 1,000 MAU (Omnichannel) |
| Pricing shape | Usage-metered per send rather than a monthly plan | Pay-as-you-go per monthly active user, unlimited push and in-app; no annual option published |
| Self-hosting | Not offered; managed cloud only | Not self-serve; private cloud and on-premise options through enterprise sales |
Strengths and limitations
Courier
Strengths
- The simplest pricing in the category: no seats, no channel fees, no contact meter, just $0.005 a send with 10,000 free every month.
- Fifty-plus provider integrations with your own credentials, which means no vendor lock-in, no reputation rebuild, and no renegotiated contracts.
- The visual template designer with multi-channel preview on one canvas is the friendliest content surface among the developer-first notification tools.
- Batching, throttling, delays, and conditions cover the notification-fatigue problem that most in-house implementations get wrong.
Limitations
- Nothing works without engineering; the API call has to come from your application, so a marketer cannot get value alone.
- Delivery is not included, so the sticker price understates the real cost and you own deliverability, domain authentication, and list hygiene entirely.
- Multi-tenancy is less developed than Knock's, which matters for B2B products giving each customer organization its own notification configuration.
- Role-based access control and EU data residency are Enterprise-only, so a European mid-market buyer with residency requirements cannot self-serve.
Pushwoosh
Strengths
- One transparent meter (monthly active users) with no feature gating: journeys, segmentation, A/B testing, analytics, API, and the AI copilot are on every plan, including the free one.
- Broad device reach from a single integration, including Huawei HMS and Amazon ADM alongside APNs and FCM, plus web push on every major browser and iOS PWAs.
- Deep segmentation for this price range: real-time behavioral segments, RFM, geo targeting, and one year of event history by default.
- A REST API with dashboard parity, event streaming out, inbound webhooks in, and a hosted MCP server for AI agents.
Limitations
- Marketing-oriented rather than developer-first: there is no published equivalent of the embeddable in-app notification feed and user preference centre that define Knock, Novu, or Courier.
- No annual billing option is published, and the $7 push-only rate is a time-limited offer.
- SMS and WhatsApp are billed by providers on top of the plan, so the true Omnichannel cost depends on channel mix.
- The free tier stops at 1,000 MAU, far below OneSignal's free mobile push allowance.
Pricing compared
Courier
Pure usage-based pricing on notifications sent, with no per-seat fee and no channel add-on charges, plus a free monthly allowance and a quoted enterprise tier with volume discounts.
- Developer$0
- Business$0.005
- EnterpriseCustom
Courier's pricing is the easiest to reason about in this whole category and, at low to moderate volume, extremely fair. Ten thousand free sends a month covers a real early-stage product, and $0.005 a send with no seat fees and no channel charges means the bill scales exactly with usage and nothing else. Against Knock, Courier is dramatically cheaper in the 10,000 to 50,000 message band, where Knock's $250 floor bites hard. The break-even flips at high volume: 400,000 sends costs $2,000 on Courier and would be an Enterprise negotiation on either platform. What you are not getting for the money is delivery, deliverability, or any marketing capability, and the honest total cost of ownership always includes the provider invoices sitting underneath.
Pushwoosh
Pay-as-you-go, metered on monthly active users (anyone messaged on any channel in the month, deduplicated by user ID). Free up to 1,000 MAU. Three self-serve plans differ only by channel: Push only, Omnichannel, and Email only. No feature gating between plans. Custom plan once the estimated bill exceeds $3,000 a month. No annual toggle is published.
- Free$0
- Push only$7
- Omnichannel$13
- Email only$5
- CustomCustom
For consumer apps, Pushwoosh is strong value. The free tier is small at 1,000 MAU but complete, and the per-MAU price includes journeys, RFM segmentation, a year of event history, and the API, which competitors often reserve for higher tiers. At 10,000 MAU the push-only plan is $63 a month and Omnichannel is roughly twice that, which undercuts most engagement suites. The value weakens in two places: when SMS and WhatsApp volume matters, because those costs sit outside the plan, and for B2B SaaS teams whose real need is an in-product notification feed and preference centre, where a developer-first router gives more for the money.
Editorial verdict on each
Courier
Ease of UseCourier is the notification orchestration layer to pick when you want the least complicated bill and the friendliest content surface. Ten thousand free sends a month is enough for a real early-stage product, $0.005 a send with no seats and no channel fees is the most predictable pricing in this category, and the visual designer with multi-channel preview means the person writing the notification does not need an engineer to publish it. Set against Knock, its nearest rival, Courier wins on price in the low and middle volume bands and on design ergonomics, and loses on multi-tenancy depth and workflows-as-code discipline. The hard limits are structural rather than fixable: delivery is not included, deliverability is entirely your problem, there is no marketing capability, and the per-send rate makes broadcast sending economically silly. For a five-person startup whose product needs to notify people without annoying them, Courier is the cheapest sensible starting point in this batch. For a five-person startup whose problem is lifecycle marketing, it is the wrong shelf entirely.
Read the full Courier profilePushwoosh
Pushwoosh is a mature, reasonably priced choice for consumer apps and websites that want push at the center of their lifecycle messaging. Its best qualities are the single MAU meter with nothing gated, delivery reach that includes Huawei and Amazon devices, and segmentation depth (RFM, real-time behavior, a year of event history) that usually costs more elsewhere. At 10,000 monthly active users the push-only plan is $63 a month, and even Omnichannel is modest by engagement-suite standards. Know what it is not: it is not a developer-first notification router with an embeddable feed and preference centre for a SaaS product, there is no annual pricing, the $7 rate is a limited-time offer, and SMS and WhatsApp costs sit outside the plan. Start on the free tier, lock the push-only rate before December 31 if push is your main channel, and look to Knock, Novu, or Courier instead if your notifications live inside a B2B product.
Read the full Pushwoosh profileCourier profile last reviewed 2026-09-07; Pushwoosh last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Notification Infrastructure
9 trackedNotification infrastructure platforms sit between an application and its delivery providers, turning one API call into orchestrated in-app, email, push, SMS, and chat notifications with batching, digests, preference centres, and per-tenant routing, so product teams stop rebuilding that logic in application code.
Batching, preference centres, and multi-tenancy are first-class rather than roadmap items, and workflows-as-code with environments and rollback makes a notification change a normal deploy.
$30 a month for 30,000 workflow runs, or nothing at all self-hosted, against a category whose next cheapest real plan is $110 and whose leader jumps from free to $250.
Founded in 2022 on roughly $1M, SuprSend shipped nine channels on the free tier, CLI environment promotion, an MCP server, and an Agent SDK while larger rivals were still writing about them.
The delivery planner turns cross-channel escalation into configuration: try in-app, fall back to email only if it goes unread, set as a rule rather than written as application code.
A visual designer that previews every channel on one canvas, and a bill that is $0.005 a send with no seats or channel fees, let a non-developer own the message end to end.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Courier and Pushwoosh?
Pushwoosh meters per monthly active user with unlimited push and in-app messages, free up to 1,000 MAU and $7 per 1,000 MAU on push only, so apps that message the same users often can pay less than Courier's per-send price; Courier remains stronger for routing transactional notifications through providers a team already uses.
Is Courier or Pushwoosh cheaper?
Courier starts at $0 (Developer, 10,000 sends per month), then $0.005 per send. Pushwoosh starts at $0 up to 1,000 MAU, then $7 per 1,000 MAU (Push only, limited offer) or $13 per 1,000 MAU (Omnichannel). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Courier pricing model: Pure usage-based pricing on notifications sent, with no per-seat fee and no channel add-on charges, plus a free monthly allowance and a quoted enterprise tier with volume discounts. Pushwoosh pricing model: Pay-as-you-go, metered on monthly active users (anyone messaged on any channel in the month, deduplicated by user ID). Free up to 1,000 MAU. Three self-serve plans differ only by channel: Push only, Omnichannel, and Email only.
Does Courier or Pushwoosh have a free plan?
Courier has a free plan. Developer includes 10,000 notification sends per month across email, push, SMS, in-app, and chat. Trial terms: No time-limited trial; the Developer plan is permanently free within its send allowance. Pushwoosh has a free plan. Free while the project stays within 1,000 monthly active users, with every feature included and no credit card required.
Who should choose Courier?
Engineering teams at product companies who already pay for SendGrid, Twilio, or Firebase and want an orchestration layer over them, particularly mixed teams where a non-developer needs to own the message content without filing tickets.
Who should choose Pushwoosh?
Consumer mobile apps and content or ecommerce websites (games, media, delivery, fintech, subscription apps) that want mobile and web push, in-app messages, and lifecycle journeys on one predictable per-MAU bill, with a genuinely usable free tier up to 1,000 monthly active users.
What are the best alternatives to Courier and Pushwoosh?
SaaSTracker profiles 9 products in Notification Infrastructure. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Knock (Category Leader), Novu (Best Value), SuprSend (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
