BLOGS
Knock Alternative: NotificationAPI - In-Depth Comparison (2025)
NotificationAPI is a Knock alternative, with many differences in how they manage third-parties, notification workflows, pricing, and support. Learn more here!
NotificationAPI is a Knock alternative, with many differences in how they manage third-parties, notification workflows, pricing, and support. Learn more here!
Full Disclosure
We are NotificationAPI, so of course, we are going to toot our own horns - boop boop. We’ve tried our best to stay as objective as possible in this comparison. If you notice an inaccuracy, let us know, and we will fix it.
TLDR
NotificationAPI:
- 5-minute setup
- 5x less expensive
- No need to pay or manage any other third-party integrations like SendGrid, Twilio, OneSignal, …
Knock:
- Custom workflow editor
- More channels and integrations
- 5x more expensive
Defining Features
NotificationAPI includes an email service and exposes more email-related capabilities. It also includes an SMS service to send notifications to any country without Twilio. This is in addition to the in-app, browser push, voice, and mobile push features. So overall, it’s much faster, cheaper, and easier to set up.
Knock acts as a router around your 3rd-parties for delivering notifications. For example, you would connect it to your own SendGrid and Twilio. So it is more difficult and pricier to set up. However, Knock has a strong notification workflow builder and supports connecting more channels.
NotificationAPI
- Supports sending notifications without any third parties
- Supported channels: Email, SMS, In-App, Push, Voice
- Preset workflows: batching, digest, throttling, and more
Knock
- Custom workflow editor
- Slack, MS Teams, WhatsApp, and other channels
Reliability
NotificationAPI and Knock seem similar in terms of reliability. However, NotificationAPI has stronger customer support, SLAs, and additional data centers.
NotificationAPI
- ~1 hour response time (EST)
- 99.9% uptime
- Data Centers: US, EU, Canada
Knock
- 99.9% uptime
- Data Centers: US only
Pricing
As a profitable and independent software company, NotificationAPI offers aggressively competitive pricing. As a VC-backed startup, Knock’s service is pricier and many of its features are locked behind the Enterprise tier.
NotificationAPI
- $0.001 per notification
- Includes 3rd-party integration costs
- Many features, such as Support SLAs, Compliance, and Log Streaming do not require the Enterprise plan.
Knock
- More than $0.005 per notification
- Pay for your own 3rd-party costs
- Limited or no support except for enterprise plans