Knock 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 assessedKnock compared with Pushwoosh
Pushwoosh costs far less at small app scale (free to 1,000 MAU, then $7 or $13 per 1,000 MAU against Knock's $250 Starter) and is stronger on mobile and web push reach, segmentation, and marketing journeys; Knock remains the better choice for developer-owned B2B product notifications with preferences and an in-app feed.
Pushwoosh compared with Knock
Knock starts at $250 a month on Starter after a 10,000-message free tier and is built around developer workflows, preferences, and an in-app feed for SaaS products. Pushwoosh costs far less at small app scale and is stronger on mobile and web push reach, segmentation, and marketing journeys. Take Knock for B2B product notifications owned by engineering; take Pushwoosh for consumer push and lifecycle messaging.
Choose Knock if
Product and engineering teams at SaaS companies who need real product notifications (in-app feed, digests, preference centers, per-tenant configuration) and want the workflow logic owned by a platform a PM can edit rather than by application code an engineer has to redeploy.
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
16 attributes| Attribute | Knock | Pushwoosh |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Notifications | Notifications |
| Starting price | $0 (Developer), then $250 per month (Starter) | $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 | Usage-based on messages sent, with a separate meter for Guide active users and AI agent credits, plus a large free tier and a single published paid plan before enterprise contracts. | 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 messages a month, 500 Guide active users, 500 AI agent credits, unlimited workflows, unlimited channels, unlimited team members, batching, delays, broadcasts, multi-tenancy, and Google SSO. | 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 | No |
| Best for | Product and engineering teams at SaaS companies who need real product notifications (in-app feed, digests, preference centers, per-tenant configuration) and want the workflow logic owned by a platform a PM can edit rather than by application code an engineer has to redeploy. | 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 | A day to a first workflow in production for a competent backend engineer, and one to three sprints to migrate an existing homegrown notification service. The in-app feed component is typically the fastest visible win. | 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 for engineers, moderate for product people. The concepts (workflows, recipients, tenants, channels, preferences) are clean, but the mental model of moving decision logic out of application code into a workflow platform takes a team a couple of weeks to internalize. | 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, CLI, React and JavaScript components, iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter clients, MCP server | 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, CCPA, HIPAA with a BAA on Enterprise | ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, GDPR and ePrivacy, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (with UK extension and Swiss DPF) |
| Founded | 2021 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, 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 messages per month | Up to 1,000 monthly active users, all features, no card |
| First paid tier | $250 per month (Starter) | $7 per 1,000 MAU (Push only, limited offer); $13 per 1,000 MAU (Omnichannel) |
| Self-hosting | Not offered; managed cloud only | Not self-serve; private cloud and on-premise options through enterprise sales |
Strengths and limitations
Knock
Strengths
- Batching, digests, preference centers, and multi-tenancy are all first-class, and they are exactly the four things engineering teams build worst when they build them in-house.
- The free Developer tier is extraordinarily generous, including unlimited workflows, unlimited channels, unlimited team members, and multi-tenancy at $0.
- Bring-your-own-provider means you keep your sending reputation, your existing SendGrid or Twilio contracts, and your negotiated rates.
- Workflows as code with CLI, version control, CI validation, environments, and one-click rollback, which makes notification changes a normal part of the software lifecycle instead of a risk.
Limitations
- Completely unusable without engineering; there is no path where a marketer signs up and gets value, because nothing happens until code calls the API.
- The pricing cliff from $0 to $250 a month with no intermediate plan penalizes exactly the small companies the free tier attracted.
- Guides are metered separately on active users, so the in-product messaging feature has its own cost curve that is easy to miss when budgeting.
- You still pay for delivery separately, and you still own deliverability, list hygiene, and domain authentication yourself.
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
Knock
Usage-based on messages sent, with a separate meter for Guide active users and AI agent credits, plus a large free tier and a single published paid plan before enterprise contracts.
- Developer$0
- Starter$250
- EnterpriseCustom
Knock is priced as infrastructure, and the honest comparison is not against Mailchimp but against the salary cost of the engineer who would otherwise own your notification service. On that basis the free tier is remarkable value and Starter at $250 is fair, since 50,000 messages with batching, preference centers, in-app feed, and multi-tenancy is a quarter of engineering work you no longer do. The weakness is the plan gap: a team sending 15,000 messages a month is paying $250 for capability it barely uses, and the separate Guides meter means the sticker price understates the cost of using the whole product. Add your own provider bills on top and Knock is never the cheapest line on the invoice, but it is usually the one that saves the most.
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
Knock
Category LeaderKnock is the right purchase when your notification problem is a product problem rather than a marketing problem. If people are complaining about email volume, if a preference center keeps slipping down the roadmap, if enterprise customers want Slack delivery, or if an engineer already owns a homegrown notification service they resent, this is the layer to buy and the free Developer tier is generous enough to prove it in a weekend. The reasons to walk away are equally clear: there is no marketing surface, nothing works without engineering, you still pay your own providers, and the leap from $0 to $250 a month with nothing in between is genuinely painful for a small team. For a five-person startup, Knock is the first thing to reach for only if you are shipping a product with an in-app notification feed. If your immediate need is onboarding emails and lifecycle campaigns, start with Customer.io, Bento, or Dittofeed and add Knock later when the product notifications become their own problem.
Read the full Knock 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 profileKnock 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 Knock and Pushwoosh?
Pushwoosh costs far less at small app scale (free to 1,000 MAU, then $7 or $13 per 1,000 MAU against Knock's $250 Starter) and is stronger on mobile and web push reach, segmentation, and marketing journeys; Knock remains the better choice for developer-owned B2B product notifications with preferences and an in-app feed.
Is Knock or Pushwoosh cheaper?
Knock starts at $0 (Developer), then $250 per month (Starter). 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. Knock pricing model: Usage-based on messages sent, with a separate meter for Guide active users and AI agent credits, plus a large free tier and a single published paid plan before enterprise contracts. 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 Knock or Pushwoosh have a free plan?
Knock has a free plan. Developer includes 10,000 messages a month, 500 Guide active users, 500 AI agent credits, unlimited workflows, unlimited channels, unlimited team members, batching, delays, broadcasts, multi-tenancy, and Google SSO. Trial terms: No time-limited trial; the Developer plan is permanently free. 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 Knock?
Product and engineering teams at SaaS companies who need real product notifications (in-app feed, digests, preference centers, per-tenant configuration) and want the workflow logic owned by a platform a PM can edit rather than by application code an engineer has to redeploy.
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 Knock and Pushwoosh?
SaaSTracker profiles 9 products in Notification Infrastructure. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Novu (Best Value), SuprSend (Momentum), MagicBell (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
