# Liveblocks

> Liveblocks is collaboration infrastructure whose Notifications product gives an application a hosted inbox, per-user notification settings, and delivery to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web push, populated automatically by mentions and comment threads from its Comments and text editor products or triggered as custom notifications from your own server.

- Category: Notification Infrastructure (https://saastracker.org/categories/notification-infrastructure)
- Website: https://liveblocks.io
- Starting price: $0 (Free), then $30 per month (Pro), or $25 per month billed annually
- Free plan: Free includes 200 custom notifications a month, unlimited collaboration notifications, all six notification channels, notification settings, batching, pre-built components, 3,000 collaboration minutes, 200 comments, 3M realtime storage updates, 1 GB of realtime storage, 3 dashboard seats, and 10 simultaneous connections per room.
- Free trial: No time-limited trial; the Free plan is permanent
- Founded: 2021, HQ: Fully remote; Liveblocks Inc. is registered in Wilmington, Delaware, United States, Ownership: Venture-backed
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-09-13
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/liveblocks

## Key facts

| Attribute | Value | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier volume | 200 custom notifications per month, collaboration notifications unlimited | liveblocks.io/pricing, checked 2026-09-13 |
| First paid tier | $30 per month, or $25 per month billed annually (Pro) | liveblocks.io/pricing, checked 2026-09-13 |
| Paid tier volume | $30 of monthly credits, then $0.005 per custom notification | liveblocks.io/pricing, checked 2026-09-13 |
| Self-hosting | Not offered for the hosted service; the sync engine and dev server are open source | liveblocks.io, checked 2026-09-13 |

## Overview

Most platforms in this category are bought after a product starts sending too much email. Liveblocks is bought before that, when a team decides to add commenting, mentions, or multiplayer editing and discovers that a notification system comes attached to the requirement. Its Notifications product is project-scoped rather than room-scoped, so a user sees everything they were mentioned in across the whole application in one tray, and the notifications that fill that tray are generated for free by the Comments and text editor products rather than triggered one by one from your backend.

The company was founded in 2021 by Guillaume Salles and Steven Fabre, who met on InVision's design tools team and set out to build a Google Slides competitor before realising the collaboration backend was the actual product. Liveblocks Inc. is fully remote with a small team, and has raised $6.4M in total: a $1.4M pre-seed and a $5M seed in March 2022 led by boldstart ventures with Atlassian Ventures and Seedcamp participating. The customer list is unusually strong for a company that size and skews developer-facing: Vercel, Rippling, Resend, Mixpanel, PostHog, Typeform, Salesloft, Foursquare, and the BBC are all named publicly.

The notification feature set is more complete than the positioning suggests. Inbox notifications come in three kinds: thread notifications for comment replies and mentions, text mention notifications from collaborative editors, and custom kinds prefixed with a dollar sign that you trigger from your server for anything else your product needs to say. Batching is built in and configurable per kind, grouping up to 50 activities into a single notification instead of stacking them. Delivery channels cover in-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, web push, and a generic webhook, and every plan including the free one gets all of them plus per-user notification settings.

Two things to be clear about before buying. Liveblocks does not send the email: it fires a webhook listing a user's unread notifications and you compose and send that message through your own provider, which is more work than Knock or Courier ask for but leaves the template and the sending reputation entirely yours. And the pre-built components are React, so a Vue or Flutter team gets the APIs and builds the tray. Pricing runs free for 200 custom notifications a month with unlimited collaboration notifications, then $30 a month ($25 billed annually) for $30 of credits with custom notifications metered at half a cent each.

## How it works

1. You wrap the part of your product people collaborate in with a Liveblocks room, and rooms belong to a project. Presence, storage, comment threads, and text editor state sync through Liveblocks in realtime. Notifications are the one feature that works across the project rather than inside a single room, which is what makes a single tray possible.

2. Collaboration notifications generate themselves. When somebody is mentioned in a comment thread or in a collaborative document, Liveblocks creates or updates an inbox notification for that user and tracks read state against it. You write no trigger code for any of this; it is a side effect of using Comments or a text editor integration.

3. Anything else your product needs to announce becomes a custom notification. Your server calls a trigger function with a kind prefixed by a dollar sign, a subject id, and your own activity data, and Liveblocks stores it as an inbox notification. Turn batching on for that kind and repeated activity on the same subject id folds into the existing notification, up to 50 activities, instead of producing a new row every time.

4. On the front end, React hooks read the notification list, unread counts, and per-user notification settings, and ready-made components from the React UI package render the tray with styling controlled through CSS variables, dark mode, and localisation. For everything outside the app, Liveblocks evaluates the project-level channel configuration against the user's own settings and fires a webhook with that user's unread notifications, which your service turns into the email, the Slack message, or the push you actually send.

## Best for

Product teams adding comments, mentions, or multiplayer editing to a web application who need the notification tray, the read state, the per-user channel settings, and the email digest hook that come with that work, and who are building in React.

## Not the right fit for

- Teams whose notifications have nothing to do with collaboration; if the messages are order confirmations, billing alerts, and system warnings, you are paying for a sync engine you will not use.
- Anyone who wants the platform to send the email; Liveblocks fires a webhook with the unread list and you compose and deliver the message yourself through your own provider.
- Non-React front ends; the hooks and pre-built inbox components are React, and a Vue, Angular, or Flutter team gets the REST API and builds the tray by hand.
- Teams that need SMS or voice in the same routing layer; the channels stop at in-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, web push, and webhook.
- Buyers who want a single predictable line item; the credit model pools notifications, comments, collaboration minutes, and storage into one balance, so the bill moves with usage you may not be tracking.

## Features

### Inbox notifications

The tray, its state, and the components that render it.

- **Project-scoped inbox**: Notifications are collected across every room in a project rather than per room, which is the difference between one notification tray and a tray per document.
- **Pre-built React components**: Inbox list and notification components ship in the React UI package on every plan including free, styled with CSS variables, with dark mode and localisation supported.
- **React hooks and client APIs**: Hooks retrieve notifications, unread counts, and settings; a JavaScript client and Node.js server library cover the same ground outside React.
- **Read and unread state**: Liveblocks tracks which notifications and which comments inside a thread a user has seen, so the unread badge is correct without your application storing it.
- **REST API**: Server endpoints read and trigger notifications directly for teams that want the data outside the front-end SDK.

### Notification kinds and batching

What can produce a notification, and how many events become one.

- **Thread notifications**: Mentions and replies in comment threads create notifications automatically, with no trigger code, as a side effect of using the Comments product.
- **Text mention notifications**: Being mentioned inside a collaborative text editor produces its own notification kind, which matters for document products where the comment and the document are different surfaces.
- **Custom notification kinds**: Any kind prefixed with a dollar sign is yours: you define the activity data and trigger it from your server, which is how non-collaboration events get into the same tray.
- **Batching per kind**: Turn batching on for a kind in the dashboard and repeated activity against the same subject id updates the existing notification instead of creating another, up to 50 activities before a new one starts.
- **Unlimited collaboration notifications**: Thread and text mention notifications are not metered on any plan, including free; only custom notifications draw on the credit balance.

### Channels and user settings

Where a notification goes once it exists, and who decides.

- **Six delivery channels**: In-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, web push, and a generic webhook, all included on every plan including free rather than gated behind a tier.
- **Per-user notification settings**: Users choose which kinds reach them on which channels, stored by Liveblocks and readable through hooks, so the preference screen is configuration rather than a schema you design.
- **Project-level channel configuration**: Delivery is decided by evaluating what the project enables against what the individual user allows, which keeps an unconfigured channel from surprising anyone.
- **Email digest webhook**: A webhook event carries a user's unread inbox notifications so you can compose a digest and send it through your own provider. You own the template, the domain, and the deliverability.
- **Webhook event frequency by plan**: Events fire at 60 second granularity on Free and Pro, 30 seconds on Team, and on custom terms for Enterprise, which sets how tight a digest cadence can be.

### The collaboration layer underneath

The products that generate most of the notifications, and the reason the inbox is cheap.

- **Comments**: Contextual comment threads with mentions, reactions, and resolve state, including pre-built components, which is the feature most teams arrive for.
- **Text editor integrations**: Collaborative editing and mentions inside Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, Slate, Quill, Monaco, CodeMirror, and Yjs-based editors.
- **Sync engine**: Conflict-free realtime storage with multiplayer undo and redo and offline support, open-sourced along with a local dev server, which is what everything else is built on.
- **Presence**: Live avatars, cursors, and selection so people can see each other in a document, which is usually the second thing a team ships after comments.
- **Agent presence and AI mentions**: AI participants appear as collaborators and can be mentioned, so an agent acting on a document generates the same notifications a colleague would.

### Platform and operations

Limits, security, and the parts of the bill that are not notifications.

- **Unlimited monthly active users and rooms**: Neither user count nor room count is a pricing lever on any plan, which is unusual in a category where monthly active users is the standard meter.
- **Simultaneous connections per room**: 10 on Free and Pro, 50 on Team, 100 on Enterprise, which is the real ceiling for anything with a large live audience in one document.
- **Version history**: 30 days on Pro, 90 days on Team, custom on Enterprise, for the documents the collaboration layer stores.
- **Dashboard and usage tracking**: Per-meter usage against the credit balance in the dashboard, which is the only way to make the credit model predictable.
- **Security and compliance**: SOC 2 and SAML single sign-on on Team and above, GDPR across the platform, and a HIPAA business associate agreement as a paid add-on.
- **Enterprise controls**: Multi-region hosting, SCIM provisioning, advanced permissions, a management API, and a dedicated solutions engineer on Enterprise contracts.

## Use cases

- **SaaS team shipping comments for the first time**: Product wants commenting and mentions on a shared object, and the moment mentions exist somebody asks for a notification tray, an unread badge, and an email when you are mentioned while away. Outcome: Comments and Notifications are the same purchase. The tray, the read state, the per-user channel settings, and the digest webhook come with the feature instead of becoming their own quarter of work.
- **Document product with a noisy editor**: Ten people edit one document over an afternoon and every mention would otherwise be its own notification and its own email. Outcome: Batching folds repeated activity on the same subject into one notification, up to 50 activities, so the tray shows a summary rather than a wall.
- **Team that wants its own email templates**: Design has strong views about what a notification email looks like, and the existing platform's template editor is the thing everyone complains about. Outcome: Liveblocks hands over the unread list in a webhook and gets out of the way. The email is composed in your codebase and sent through your own provider, which is more work and total control.
- **Small team watching the bill**: The product sends a few thousand collaboration notifications a month and a couple of hundred custom ones, and the category's usual answer is $250 a month. Outcome: Collaboration notifications are unmetered on every plan and Pro is $30 a month with $30 of credits, so the same workload that costs $250 elsewhere sits inside a $30 subscription.

## Pricing

A credit balance per month shared across every meter (collaboration minutes, comments, custom notifications, and realtime storage), with a free plan, two published paid tiers, and pay-as-you-go rates once the credits are spent.

- **Free**: $0 per month. 200 custom notifications a month, collaboration notifications unlimited; All channels: in-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, web push, webhook; 3,000 collaboration minutes, 200 comments, 1 GB realtime storage; Unlimited monthly active users and rooms, 10 connections per room; 3 dashboard seats, Liveblocks branding shown. Described as being for development and prototyping, but the notification allowances are real and the channel list is not cut down.
- **Pro**: $30 per month, or $25 per month billed annually. $30 of monthly credits across every meter; $0.005 per custom notification, $0.01 per comment, $0.002 per collaboration minute after credits; Liveblocks branding removed; 30 days of version history; 3 dashboard seats, 10 connections per room. The cheapest paid entry in this category by a wide margin, and the reason a small product can run a real inbox for the price of a lunch.
- **Team**: From $600 per month, or from $500 per month billed annually. From $600 to $5,000 of monthly credits across five tiers; SOC 2 and SAML single sign-on; 50 simultaneous connections per room, 30 second webhook frequency; 90 days of version history, public and private comments; 10 dashboard seats, then $10 per seat. The jump from $30 to $600 is the plan structure's weak point, mirroring the free to $250 cliff its rivals have one tier lower.
- **Enterprise**: Custom annual contract. Volume discounts and custom credit allocations; Multi-region hosting and a management API; SCIM provisioning and advanced permissions; 100 simultaneous connections per room; Dedicated solutions engineer and premium support.

Add-ons:

- Custom notifications beyond credits ($0.005 per notification): Collaboration notifications from threads and mentions are never metered.
- Comments beyond credits ($0.01 per comment): 200 included on Free, then drawn from the credit balance.
- Collaboration minutes beyond credits ($0.002 per minute): 3,000 included on Free. This is usually the meter that moves first.
- Realtime storage ($1 per 1M updates and $0.15 per GB stored): 3M updates and 1 GB included on Free.
- HIPAA business associate agreement ($350 per month): Billed yearly, on Team and above.

Billing notes:

- Every meter draws on one credit balance, so a busy month of collaborative editing can consume the credits you assumed were paying for notifications. Watch collaboration minutes first; it is the meter that moves fastest.
- Collaboration notifications, the ones generated by mentions and comment threads, are unlimited on every plan. Only custom notifications you trigger yourself are metered, at $0.005 each.
- Monthly active users and rooms are not metered on any plan, which makes Liveblocks unusually cheap for products with a large but lightly active user base.
- Annual billing saves 17 percent, taking Pro to $25 a month and Team to $500.
- You still pay your own email provider, because Liveblocks hands you a webhook rather than sending the message. Budget a transactional email service separately.
- Dashboard seats are 3 on Free and Pro with no overage option, so a larger team that needs console access is pushed to Team at $600 a month.

Value assessment: Judged as notification infrastructure, Pro at $30 a month is the cheapest credible option in this category by an order of magnitude, and the free plan is genuinely usable because the channel list and batching are not withheld from it. The reason it is cheap is that the expensive part, composing and sending the email, stays with you, and the notifications that would otherwise be metered are the ones the collaboration products generate for nothing. The model breaks down in two places: the credit pool makes the bill hard to forecast if collaborative editing is heavy, and the step from $30 to $600 arrives sooner than the number suggests once a team needs SOC 2, more than three console seats, or more than ten people in one room. Buy it when collaboration is genuinely part of the product; it is poor value as a general notification router.

## Strengths

- The notification tray, read state, per-user channel settings, and batching arrive as part of shipping comments and mentions, which is the work most teams were dreading anyway.
- All six delivery channels, notification settings, batching, and the pre-built components are available on the free plan, which almost nothing else in this category does.
- Collaboration notifications are unmetered on every plan, so the highest-volume notification type in a collaborative product costs nothing.
- Pro at $30 a month, or $25 billed annually, is the cheapest paid entry in the category by a very large margin.
- Monthly active users and rooms are never priced, so a product with a big, lightly active audience is not punished for it.
- A customer list well beyond the company's size, including Vercel, Rippling, Resend, Mixpanel, PostHog, Typeform, Salesloft, and the BBC.
- The sync engine and local dev server are open source, which lowers the risk of building on a small company's proprietary core.

## Limitations

- Liveblocks never sends the email. It fires a webhook with the unread list and you compose and deliver the message yourself, which is real work the rest of this category absorbs for you.
- No SMS, no voice, and no mobile push beyond web push, so anything reaching a phone outside a browser needs another tool.
- Pre-built components are React. A Vue, Angular, or Flutter team gets APIs and builds the tray, which is the same complaint people make about Knock.
- The credit model pools four unrelated meters into one balance, which makes forecasting harder than a flat message allowance and hides which feature is spending the money.
- Three dashboard seats on Free and Pro with no per-seat overage, so console access alone can force a $600 plan.
- SOC 2 and SAML start at Team, so a security review at a mid-market buyer pushes a $30 subscription to $600 in one step.
- It is a collaboration platform first. If your notifications are billing alerts and system warnings rather than comments and mentions, you are buying a sync engine to get an inbox.
- Small company, $6.4M raised since 2021 and no round since, holding a position in your product's critical path.

## Comparisons

- **Liveblocks vs Knock**: Both put a notification feed in your product and neither sends the mail itself, but they start from opposite ends. Knock is an orchestration engine: workflows, cross-channel fallback, delays, per-tenant configuration, SMS and mobile push through your own providers, free to 10,000 messages and then $250 a month. Liveblocks is a collaboration platform whose inbox is generated by comments and mentions, with no SMS, no workflow branching, and Pro at $30. If your notifications are events flowing out of a backend across many channels, Knock. If they are people mentioning each other inside your product, Liveblocks does that job for a twentieth of the price and brings the commenting with it.
- **Liveblocks vs MagicBell**: The most direct comparison in the category: both are inbox-first rather than workflow-first. MagicBell is a standalone notification centre you point at any event source, free to 1,000 deliveries and then $249 a month for 50,000. Liveblocks makes the inbox a byproduct of Comments, meters only the custom notifications you trigger yourself, and charges $30 a month. Take MagicBell when the inbox has to serve notifications your backend already produces and collaboration is not part of the product. Take Liveblocks when you are adding comments or multiplayer editing anyway, because then the inbox is nearly free.
- **Liveblocks vs Courier**: Courier is a router: one API into push, email, SMS, in-app, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, metered at $0.005 a send with 10,000 free a month and a strong template designer for non-developers. Liveblocks routes far less (no SMS, no mobile push, no template designer) and instead generates notifications from collaboration and hands you a webhook to send the email. A team whose problem is that six kinds of message go to five destinations should take Courier. A team whose problem is that mentions need a tray should take Liveblocks.
- **Liveblocks vs Novu**: Both appeal to teams who want control, from different directions. Novu is open-source notification infrastructure with workflows, digests, an inbox component, and a self-hostable core, free to 10,000 events and around $30 a month on cloud. Liveblocks open-sources its sync engine but the notification service is hosted only, and its strength is that comments and mentions produce the notifications for you. At the same price point, pick Novu if you need workflow orchestration, digests across arbitrary events, or self-hosting. Pick Liveblocks if the notifications are collaboration events and you also want the commenting.
- **Liveblocks vs SuprSend**: SuprSend is full orchestration for product teams: channel routing, vendor fallback, preferences, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, batching, free to 10,000 notifications and paid from around $110 a month. Liveblocks covers a narrower slice at a lower price and brings comments, mentions, and multiplayer editing with it. If the requirement is a routing layer over several vendors, SuprSend. If the requirement is a tray full of mentions in a collaborative product, Liveblocks costs a fraction and does more of the surrounding work.
- **Liveblocks vs OneSignal**: Barely competitors. OneSignal owns mobile and web push with its own delivery included and a free tier that carries real volume, sold to growth teams running campaigns. Liveblocks has web push only, no campaign tooling, no segmentation, and exists to tell people what happened inside a document they were working on. A product that needs to reach a phone uses OneSignal; a product that needs an unread badge next to a comment uses Liveblocks. Running both is normal and they never touch.
- **Liveblocks vs Siren**: Opposite answers to who the notification is about. Siren routes across nine channels including WhatsApp, Discord, and LINE, adds provider pools and an agent toolkit, has no free tier, and starts at $249 a month. Liveblocks stops at in-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web push, is free for 200 custom notifications a month, and generates the rest from comments and mentions at no cost. If an agent or a backend service is the sender and the channel mix is wide, Siren. If a colleague is the sender and the surface is a document, Liveblocks, for about a tenth of the money.

## Pairs well with

Liveblocks is a notifications tool, and a team running it still has 6 neighbouring categories to staff. The pick in each is tawk.to for customer support platforms, Product Fruits for product onboarding & PLG, Textedly for SMS marketing, Creem for subscription billing, Mixpanel for product analytics & session replay and ChartMogul for retention & churn prevention, each the leading tool in that category on published criteria.

| Category | Ideal pairing | Because | Benefit |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Customer Support Platforms | [tawk.to](https://saastracker.org/products/tawk-to) (Best Value) | Liveblocks is built for notifications, not support. tawk.to adds Hired Agents service at $1 an hour. | Questions arrive in one queue with a history attached, instead of scattered across personal inboxes. |
| Product Onboarding & PLG | [Product Fruits](https://saastracker.org/products/product-fruits) (Best Value) | Liveblocks lists it is a collaboration platform first among its limits. Product Fruits adds certifications well beyond what a 27-person company usually carries. | New users reach the thing the product is for without a call, and the drop-off shows up in the data. |
| SMS Marketing | [Textedly](https://saastracker.org/products/textedly) (Best Value) | Liveblocks is built for notifications, not SMS. Textedly adds free incoming messages on every plan. | The urgent message gets read within minutes, on the one channel almost nobody ignores. |
| Subscription Billing | [Creem](https://saastracker.org/products/creem) (Best Value) | Liveblocks is built for notifications, not billing. Creem adds affiliate programs with automatic commission splits and revenue splits between partners. | Recurring revenue bills, retries and reconciles itself, including the tax nobody wants to calculate. |
| Product Analytics & Session Replay | [Mixpanel](https://saastracker.org/products/mixpanel) (Best Value) | Liveblocks lists SOC 2 and SAML start at Team among its limits. Mixpanel adds a free tier of 1 million events and 10,000 replays per month. | Feature usage and drop-off are measurable, so a roadmap argument can end with evidence. |
| Retention & Churn Prevention | [ChartMogul](https://saastracker.org/products/chartmogul) (Best Value) | Liveblocks lists pre-built components are React among its limits. ChartMogul adds splits MRR movement into new, expansion, contraction, churn, and reactivation. | Accounts at risk surface while there is still time to call, rather than at renewal. |

Pairings follow the SaaSTracker methodology (https://saastracker.org/methodology): the leading tool in each complementary category, chosen on published criteria. Placement cannot be purchased.

## Implementation

- Setup time: A day to a working inbox if you are already using Comments, since the notifications generate themselves and the tray is a component. Two to four weeks for a full build that adds collaborative editing, custom notification kinds, and an email digest service you write yourself.
- Learning curve: Moderate. Rooms, projects, threads, inbox notifications, and notification settings are clean concepts, but the split between what Liveblocks stores and what your backend still owns takes a little while to internalise, and the credit model needs one careful read before anyone forecasts a bill.
- Onboarding: Self-serve on Free and Pro, carried by documentation, examples, and starter kits. Team adds a private Slack channel; Enterprise adds a dedicated solutions engineer.
- Migration: Moving an existing homegrown comment or notification system is the common path and it is not a small job, because the comment data model and the notification read state both move. The email side is the opposite of most migrations here: rather than reconnecting a provider, you keep your existing transactional email service and write a webhook handler that turns unread lists into messages. Existing user preferences need importing into notification settings before cutover, or people who opted out will start hearing from you again.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web dashboard, REST API, React and React UI packages, JavaScript client, Node.js server library, Webhooks
- API: REST API plus a Node.js server library for triggering and reading notifications, React hooks and pre-built components for the front end, and webhook events for delivery to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web push. Editor integrations cover Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, Slate, Quill, Monaco, CodeMirror, and Yjs.
- Compliance: SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA with a business associate agreement (paid add-on)
- Data residency: Single region by default; multi-region hosting is an Enterprise capability.
- SSO: SAML single sign-on on Team and above; SCIM provisioning on Enterprise. Dashboard seats are capped at 3 on Free and Pro.
- Security notes: Access is governed by permissions issued per room and per user from your own backend, so Liveblocks never decides who may read a document. SOC 2 and SAML arrive on Team, a HIPAA business associate agreement is available as a $350 a month add-on billed yearly, and advanced permissions plus a management API are Enterprise features. The sync engine and local dev server are open source, which lets a team inspect the core it is depending on.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, Discord community, Private Slack channel on Team, Dedicated solutions engineer on Enterprise
- Documentation: Extensive documentation at liveblocks.io/docs covering rooms, Comments, Notifications, the sync engine, every editor integration, and the webhook events, with examples and starter kits per framework and documentation explicitly optimised for AI agents.
- Community: Active Discord and GitHub presence, a weekly changelog, and an open-source sync engine and dev server.

## Company

- Founded: 2021
- Founders: Guillaume Salles, Steven Fabre
- Headquarters: Fully remote; Liveblocks Inc. is registered in Wilmington, Delaware, United States
- Ownership: Venture-backed
- Employees: Small team, roughly a dozen people listed publicly
- Funding: $6.4M raised in total across a $1.4M pre-seed and a $5M seed round in March 2022 led by boldstart ventures.

Funding history:

- Pre-seed (2021): $1.4M. Backed by boldstart ventures, Seedcamp, and others.
- Seed (2022): $5M. Led by boldstart ventures with Atlassian Ventures and Seedcamp participating.

Timeline:

- 2021: Founded by Guillaume Salles and Steven Fabre, who met on InVision's design tools team and built the collaboration backend for a product they then abandoned in favour of the backend.
- 2022: Raises a $5M seed round led by boldstart ventures with Atlassian Ventures and Seedcamp, taking total funding to $6.4M.
- 2023: Comments ships, bringing contextual threads and mentions with pre-built components, and with it the notifications those mentions generate.
- 2024: Notifications becomes a product in its own right, with custom notification kinds, per-user settings, and delivery channels beyond the in-app inbox.
- 2025: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web push join email as notification channels, and batching lands for custom kinds.
- 2026: Repositions around the agentic web: the sync engine and dev server are open-sourced, agent presence and AI mentions ship, and pricing moves to a shared monthly credit balance.

## Integrations

Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, Slate, Quill, Monaco, and CodeMirror editors, Yjs, React, Next.js, and JavaScript clients, Redux and Zustand, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Web push, Any transactional email provider, through the notification webhook

## FAQ

### What is Liveblocks?

Liveblocks is collaboration infrastructure: a sync engine, contextual comments, collaborative text editing, and a notifications product. In this category it matters for Notifications, which gives your application a hosted inbox with read state, per-user channel settings, batching, and delivery to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web push, populated automatically by mentions and comment threads or by custom notifications you trigger from your server.

### How much does Liveblocks cost?

The Free plan is permanent and includes 200 custom notifications a month, unlimited collaboration notifications, every delivery channel, notification settings, batching, and the pre-built components. Pro is $30 a month, or $25 billed annually, and gives you $30 of monthly credits with custom notifications metered at $0.005 each afterwards. Team starts at $600 a month and adds SOC 2 and SAML. Enterprise is a custom contract.

### Does Liveblocks send the notification emails?

No. It fires a webhook listing a user's unread inbox notifications, and your service composes the email and sends it through your own provider. You own the template, the domain, the sending reputation, and the deliverability. That is more work than Knock or Courier ask for, and it is also why the subscription costs $30 rather than $250.

### Can I use Liveblocks Notifications without using Comments?

Yes, through custom notification kinds: you trigger them from your server with your own activity data and they land in the same inbox. But the economics and most of the appeal come from collaboration notifications, which are unmetered on every plan. If you are not using Comments or a text editor integration, you are paying for a sync engine to get a notification tray, and a purpose-built platform is the better buy.

### What are credits and how do they work?

Every plan carries a monthly credit balance that all four meters draw on: collaboration minutes at $0.002 each, comments at $0.01 each, custom notifications at $0.005 each, and realtime storage at $1 per million updates plus $0.15 per gigabyte stored. Free has hard caps per meter; Pro includes $30 of credits and then bills the same rates. Collaboration minutes are usually what empties the balance first, so track that meter before the notification one.

### Which notification channels does Liveblocks support?

In-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, web push, and a generic webhook, all included on every plan including Free. There is no SMS, no voice, and no native mobile push, so anything that has to reach a phone outside a browser needs a second tool.

### Does Liveblocks support batching or digests?

Yes. Batching is configurable per custom notification kind in the dashboard: when it is on, new activity against the same subject id updates the existing notification rather than creating another, up to 50 activities before a new one begins. The email digest is built on top of that, using the unread webhook.

### Do I have to use React?

For the pre-built inbox components and hooks, yes. There is a JavaScript client, a Node.js server library, and a REST API for everything else, so a Vue, Angular, or Flutter team can build the tray by hand against the data, but the fast path is React and Next.js.

### Is Liveblocks open source or self-hostable?

The sync engine and a local development server are open source, which is unusual and lowers the risk of building on a small company's core. The hosted service itself is not self-hostable. Teams whose requirement is self-hosting the notification layer should look at Novu instead.

### Who is behind Liveblocks and how is it funded?

Liveblocks was founded in 2021 by Guillaume Salles and Steven Fabre, who met on InVision's design tools team. The company is fully remote, registered as Liveblocks Inc. in Delaware, and has raised $6.4M in total: a $1.4M pre-seed and a $5M seed in March 2022 led by boldstart ventures with Atlassian Ventures and Seedcamp. Named customers include Vercel, Rippling, Resend, Mixpanel, PostHog, Typeform, Salesloft, Foursquare, and the BBC.

### What should I pair Liveblocks with?

Liveblocks is a notifications tool, and a team running it still has 6 neighbouring categories to staff. The pick in each is tawk.to for customer support platforms, Product Fruits for product onboarding & PLG, Textedly for SMS marketing, Creem for subscription billing, Mixpanel for product analytics & session replay and ChartMogul for retention & churn prevention, each the leading tool in that category on published criteria.

### What do I pair with Liveblocks for Customer Support Platforms?

tawk.to. Liveblocks is built for notifications, not support. tawk.to adds Hired Agents service at $1 an hour.

### Is Liveblocks enough on its own?

For notifications, yes. Liveblocks does not cover product onboarding & PLG, SMS marketing and subscription billing, and its own profile says so; Product Fruits, Textedly and Creem are the tools that fill those gaps.

## Editorial verdict

Liveblocks is the right purchase when the notifications your product needs are about people working on the same thing. Add Comments or a collaborative editor and the inbox, the unread state, the per-user channel settings, the batching, and the email digest hook arrive with it, the notifications those features generate are never metered, and the paid plan starts at $30 a month against $249 or $250 everywhere else in this category. Two things should send you elsewhere. If your notifications are billing alerts, order updates, and system warnings with no collaboration behind them, you are buying a sync engine to get a tray and Knock, Courier, or SuprSend will serve you better. And if the messages have to reach a phone by SMS or native push, Liveblocks does not go there at all. For a React product adding collaboration, it is the cheapest good answer in the category by a distance.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-09-13. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology