BLOGS
Push Notification APIs Compared for Developers (June 2025)
A comprehensive technical comparison of leading push notification services including OneSignal, NotificationAPI, Firebase, and Airship, focusing on developer experience, pricing, features, and scalability.
Motivation
Traditional incumbents like OneSignal built their platforms primarily for marketing teams, creating complexity for developers building transactional notification systems. Modern alternatives like NotificationAPI and Firebase now focus on developer experience and transactional use cases, prioritizing simple APIs and reliable delivery over marketing automation.
This comparison helps developers choose the right push notification service for their specific needs.
Evaluation Criteria
- Pricing & Free Tier
- Developer Experience and Ease
- Features
- Support
Summary Table & TLDR
- Cheapest but requiring most amount of effort => Firebase
- Best for building transactional notification systems => NotificationAPI
- Best for marketing & experimentation => OneSignal
- Best for enterprise and retention use cases => Airship
| Provider | Free Tier | Cost (per 1k notifications) | Developer Experience & Ease | Features | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OneSignal | 10k subscribers, 1 active campaign | $2 + $0.004-$0.012 per user | ✅ All major frameworks ✅ Token management | ✅ Web and mobile ✅ Multi-channel (Email, SMS, In-app) ✅ A/B testing ✅ Rich media | 24-hours through email |
| NotificationAPI | 30k notifications/month, no other limits | $1 | ❌ Only iOS, Android, JS SDKs ✅ Token management | ✅ Web and mobile ✅ Email, SMS, In-app ✅ Detailed logs ✅ User preferences ✅ US, EU, CA regions | ✅ 1-hour response time |
| Firebase | ✅ No limits | ✅ Free | ✅ All major frameworks ❌ No token management | ✅ Web and mobile ✅ Google ecosystem ✅ Real-time messaging ✅ Topics & device groups | ❌ Community |
| Airship | 1k subscribers, limited features | ❌ Paid plans starting at $12,000/year | ✅ All major frameworks ✅ Token management | ✅ Web and mobile ✅ Enterprise features ✅ Rich automation ✅ Advanced segmentation | Only in enterprise paid plans |
Pricing & Free Tier
Firebase is completely free for any amount of push notifications, but it requires the most technical know-how and development effort to implement properly.
Airship is the most expensive option with plans starting at $12,000/year, making it suitable primarily for large enterprise organizations with substantial budgets.
NotificationAPI and OneSignal sit in the middle with a good balance of features and pricing.
Developer Experience and Ease
NotificationAPI is the easiest to integrate if you wish to build a complete notification system with user preferences and other channels. It handles token management, user preferences, and cross-channel orchestration out of the box.
Firebase is the hardest to integrate due to having to manage your own token and user relations. You’ll need to build your own systems for user preference management, token tracking, and cross-platform coordination.
OneSignal and Airship fall somewhere in between, offering good SDKs and documentation but requiring more setup than NotificationAPI for comprehensive notification systems. However, both offer more framework/language integrations than NotificationAPI.
Features
Channels
All providers support Android, iOS, and web (browser) push notifications as their core offering. NotificationAPI supports transactional email, SMS, and in-app notifications out of the box with no additional effort. OneSignal and Airship support email and SMS as well, but they are geared towards marketing use-cases and require an enterprise plan and additional setup.
Data Residency
NotificationAPI is the only provider that supports isolated regions, making it ideal for health, government, or other industries that require strict data residency compliance. Data can be kept entirely within US, EU, or Canadian borders.
Automations
Airship and OneSignal offer the most robust journey/campaign management features which are great for sales/marketing operations. NotificationAPI’s automations on the other hand are more focused on developer pain points, such as deduplication and throttling.
Firebase does not offer any automations out of the box.
Support
As much larger company, Firebase (Google) has a community-driven support without dedicated resources for each individual company.
NotificationAPI has the strongest suppport, offering a 1-hour response time for all support requests during EST business hours, across Slack, chat, email, and video calls.
OneSignal sits somewhere in between, offering a 24-hour response time for all support requests.
Airship’s support is gated behind their enterprise tier.
TLDR & Conclusion
Choose NotificationAPI if you are building a comprehensive notification system with multiple channels (email, SMS, push, in-app) and need unified user preferences and orchestration.
Choose Firebase if you have the resources to dedicate to a bigger notification project and are price sensitive.
For all other scenarios, OneSignal is probably the right choice. If you are ok with $12k+ contracts, Airship is a good option.