Novu vs OneSignal
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 assessedNovu compared with OneSignal
OneSignal includes delivery, gives away unlimited mobile push, and is operable by a growth team once the SDK is installed. Novu delivers nothing itself and is unusable without engineering. If the goal is reaching consumers with push campaigns, OneSignal is cheaper and better shaped. If the goal is orchestrating product notifications with digests and preferences on infrastructure you can self-host, Novu is the only one of the two that qualifies.
OneSignal compared with Novu
Novu is open source, metered by workflow runs from $30 a month, and can be self-hosted, which makes it the choice when data control or embedding into your own SaaS is the deciding factor. OneSignal is closed, hosted, and free for unlimited push. Novu wins for engineering teams who want to own the stack; OneSignal wins for growth teams who want the best push channel at the lowest price.
Choose Novu if
Engineering teams who want notification infrastructure they can read, fork, and self-host if they need to, and small companies who want a real paid plan at $30 a month rather than a $250 floor.
Choose OneSignal if
Consumer mobile apps, marketplaces, media sites, and web publishers whose primary channel is push notifications, especially teams that want serious push infrastructure and a workable email and in-app layer for free or for tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds.
Side by side
16 attributes| Attribute | Novu | OneSignal |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Notifications | Notifications |
| Starting price | $0 (Free or self-hosted), then $30 per month (Pro) | $0 (Free), then $19 per month plus usage (Growth) |
| Pricing model | Usage-based on workflow runs (one run per triggered workflow regardless of how many channels it fans out to), with a free tier, two published paid tiers, quoted enterprise pricing, and a free open-source self-hosted option. | Per-channel usage metering rather than a single contact-count meter: mobile push billed per monthly active user, web push per subscriber, email per thousand sends, with a small platform fee on Growth and quoted annual contracts above it. |
| Free plan | 10,000 workflow runs per month, up to 20 workflows, two environments, three team members, and 24 hours of activity feed retention, across every channel. | Unlimited mobile push sends, web push up to 10,000 subscribers per send, 10,000 email sends per month, and one active in-app message, with no expiry. |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the free cloud plan and the open-source distribution both serve as evaluation paths | No fixed trial; the permanently free plan is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Engineering teams who want notification infrastructure they can read, fork, and self-host if they need to, and small companies who want a real paid plan at $30 a month rather than a $250 floor. | Consumer mobile apps, marketplaces, media sites, and web publishers whose primary channel is push notifications, especially teams that want serious push infrastructure and a workable email and in-app layer for free or for tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds. |
| Setup time | An afternoon for a cloud integration with the Inbox component. Self-hosting is a different project: a day or two to a working Docker deployment and considerably longer to something a team would trust in production, with MongoDB and Redis to operate afterwards. | Under an hour for web push (a script tag) and a few hours for a mobile app, most of which is spent on APNs certificates and Firebase configuration rather than on OneSignal itself. Journeys can be running the same day. |
| Learning curve | Low for engineers. Subscribers, workflows, steps, and providers are clean concepts and the CLI quickstart gets a first notification flowing in minutes. Workflows as code is the part teams take longest to adopt, because it changes who owns a message change. | Low for push and in-app, moderate for Journeys. The tag model is easy to grasp but easy to abuse, and teams who tag indiscriminately end up with segmentation logic nobody can audit six months later. Agree a tag naming convention before you start. |
| Platforms | Web dashboard, REST API, CLI, React Inbox component, Self-hosted via Docker or Kubernetes, Private cloud deployment | Web app, Android SDK, iOS SDK, Flutter, React Native, Expo, Unity, Web push script, REST API |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA support | SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA |
| Founded | 2021 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Tel Aviv, Israel | San Mateo, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, open-source core | Venture-backed |
| Free tier volume | 10,000 workflow runs per month | Unlimited mobile push sends, 10,000 web push subscribers and 10,000 email sends per month |
| First paid tier | $30 per month (Pro) | $19 per month (Growth) plus per-channel usage |
| Self-hosting | Yes, open source and self-hostable | Not offered; managed cloud only |
Strengths and limitations
Novu
Strengths
- Genuinely open source with a self-hostable core, which is the only real answer in this batch to data sovereignty, embedding, and vendor risk concerns.
- Pro at $30 a month is the cheapest meaningful paid tier among developer notification tools and fills the gap Knock's plan structure leaves wide open.
- The workflow-run meter is cheaper than per-message billing for any notification that fans out to more than one channel.
- The React Inbox component ships a real-time notification centre with preferences, snooze, and quiet hours in an afternoon, with a headless option for teams that want their own UI.
Limitations
- Self-hosting is free in licence terms only; running MongoDB, Redis, and the surrounding services is a permanent operational cost that small teams routinely underestimate.
- The free plan's 20-workflow, 2-environment, and 3-seat caps constrain growing teams before the run count does.
- Multi-tenancy, per-customer branding, and enterprise access controls are less developed than Knock's, which matters for B2B products with tenant-specific configuration.
- Small company on $7M raised holding a critical path position, mitigated but not eliminated by the open-source licence.
OneSignal
Strengths
- The best push implementation in this category by a wide margin, covering mobile, web, rich media, per-platform payload control, confirmed delivery reporting, and iOS Live Activities.
- A permanently free plan with unlimited mobile push, which removes the budget conversation entirely for early-stage consumer apps.
- Per-channel usage metering means a big dormant contact database costs nothing, the opposite of profile-based platforms where dead contacts are billable.
- First-party SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, Expo, and Unity that handle the permission and certificate plumbing teams usually get wrong.
Limitations
- SMS and RCS are locked behind an annual quoted Professional contract, so the cheapest self-serve path to SMS is a different vendor entirely.
- Segmentation is tag, session, and device based rather than a full behavioral event store, so sequence-dependent targeting is harder here than in Customer.io or Vero.
- No native account or company object, which makes B2B SaaS lifecycle logic awkward and rules the platform out for anyone whose messaging is organization-shaped.
- Email is a competent secondary channel, not a strong one; template tooling and list management are thinner than in email-first products.
Pricing compared
Novu
Usage-based on workflow runs (one run per triggered workflow regardless of how many channels it fans out to), with a free tier, two published paid tiers, quoted enterprise pricing, and a free open-source self-hosted option.
- Free$0
- ProFrom $30
- TeamFrom $250
- EnterpriseCustom
Novu is the best-value paid plan in the developer notification category and the only one with a self-hosting escape hatch. Pro at $30 for 30,000 workflow runs is an order of magnitude cheaper than Knock's $250 floor, and the workflow-run meter is more forgiving than a per-message meter the moment you send to more than one channel. At 100,000 runs a month you are paying around $114 against Courier's $500 for a comparable message count. What you give up is maturity: the enterprise controls, multi-tenancy depth, and operational polish of Knock are ahead, the company is small, and self-hosting is only free if your engineers' time is worthless. For teams weighing cost against maturity, Novu is the value pick and Knock is the safe pick.
OneSignal
Per-channel usage metering rather than a single contact-count meter: mobile push billed per monthly active user, web push per subscriber, email per thousand sends, with a small platform fee on Growth and quoted annual contracts above it.
- Free$0
- Growth$19
- ProfessionalCustom
- EnterpriseCustom
Judged per dollar, OneSignal is the cheapest serious multi-channel platform a small company can buy, and by some distance. Unlimited mobile push at $0 is not a loss leader trick, it is the product, and Growth at $19 plus a per-MAU rate keeps a 5,000-user app under $100 a month with email, in-app, and Journeys included. What you are not buying is a data platform: segmentation is tag and session based rather than a real behavioral event store, there is no account model, and email is a channel rather than a deliverability practice. The value is exceptional if push is your primary channel and merely fine if it is your third.
Editorial verdict on each
Novu
Best ValueNovu is the value and control pick in developer notification infrastructure. Pro at $30 a month for 30,000 workflow runs undercuts every closed competitor by an order of magnitude, the workflow-run meter is more forgiving than per-message billing the moment a notification touches two channels, and the React Inbox component delivers the thing most teams actually came for in an afternoon. The open-source licence is not decoration: it is the only credible answer in this batch to data sovereignty requirements, to embedding notifications into a product you sell, and to the reasonable worry about putting critical path infrastructure on a company that has raised $7M. The costs are honest ones. Self-hosting is free only if your engineers' time is, multi-tenancy and enterprise controls trail Knock, and there is no marketing surface at all. For a five-person startup that needs an in-app notification feed and digests without a $250 monthly floor, Novu Cloud is the sensible first purchase in this batch, and the ability to self-host later is worth having even if you never use it.
Read the full Novu profileOneSignal
OneSignal is the correct first choice for any small company whose primary channel is push. Nothing else in this category gives away unlimited mobile push, and nothing else handles APNs, FCM, web push, and Live Activities with this much per-platform care. Growth at $19 plus $0.012 per monthly active user keeps a real consumer app under $100 a month with Journeys, in-app messaging, and email included, and the per-channel meter means a large dormant install base costs you nothing. The limits are equally clear: segmentation is tags and sessions rather than a behavioral event store, there is no account model for B2B, email is adequate rather than good, and SMS demands an annual quoted contract. Buy it for push, keep it for in-app and email, and pair it with something else if your lifecycle logic is really about product events or company records.
Read the full OneSignal profileNovu profile last reviewed 2026-09-07; OneSignal last reviewed 2026-09-07. 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 Novu and OneSignal?
OneSignal includes delivery, gives away unlimited mobile push, and is operable by a growth team once the SDK is installed. Novu delivers nothing itself and is unusable without engineering. If the goal is reaching consumers with push campaigns, OneSignal is cheaper and better shaped. If the goal is orchestrating product notifications with digests and preferences on infrastructure you can self-host, Novu is the only one of the two that qualifies.
Is Novu or OneSignal cheaper?
Novu starts at $0 (Free or self-hosted), then $30 per month (Pro). OneSignal starts at $0 (Free), then $19 per month plus usage (Growth). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Novu pricing model: Usage-based on workflow runs (one run per triggered workflow regardless of how many channels it fans out to), with a free tier, two published paid tiers, quoted enterprise pricing, and a free open-source self-hosted option. OneSignal pricing model: Per-channel usage metering rather than a single contact-count meter: mobile push billed per monthly active user, web push per subscriber, email per thousand sends, with a small platform fee on Growth and quoted annual contracts above it.
Does Novu or OneSignal have a free plan?
Novu has a free plan. 10,000 workflow runs per month, up to 20 workflows, two environments, three team members, and 24 hours of activity feed retention, across every channel. Trial terms: No time-limited trial; the free cloud plan and the open-source distribution both serve as evaluation paths. OneSignal has a free plan. Unlimited mobile push sends, web push up to 10,000 subscribers per send, 10,000 email sends per month, and one active in-app message, with no expiry. Trial terms: No fixed trial; the permanently free plan is the evaluation path.
Who should choose Novu?
Engineering teams who want notification infrastructure they can read, fork, and self-host if they need to, and small companies who want a real paid plan at $30 a month rather than a $250 floor.
Who should choose OneSignal?
Consumer mobile apps, marketplaces, media sites, and web publishers whose primary channel is push notifications, especially teams that want serious push infrastructure and a workable email and in-app layer for free or for tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds.
What are the best alternatives to Novu and OneSignal?
SaaSTracker profiles 9 products in Notification Infrastructure. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Knock (Category Leader), 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.
