It’s time to wrap 2025. Here is our annual letter to our customers, community, and friends about what we got done in the last twelve months.
In this letter, we share:
- How our vision grew in 2025
- What we shipped
- Where we’re headed next
Where we started
We started 2025 as the leader in the notification infrastructure category. Customers were primarily using Knock to power product notifications, including in-app inboxes, transactional email, push and SMS notifications, even Slack integrations.
As we spoke to a growing number of power users, we learned they wanted to bring more of their messaging use cases into Knock.
This included:
- Managing in-app messaging moments like banners, product changelogs, upgrade nudges, and modals.
- Sending one-time campaigns and announcements using their existing Knock templates, layouts, and partials.
- Locally managing Knock resources and migrating workflows into Knock with AI-native tools like Claude Code and Cursor.
With that, we got to work.
What we shipped in 2025
We shipped 33 changelogs in 2025. Here are four big highlights that changed how customers used Knock this year.
Guides
Guides use your own components to power in-app messages that drive activation and upsells.
Our customers told us how legacy in-app messaging vendors bloat performance and degrade design. We built Guides to power modern in-app messaging that solves these problems.
Since launching Guides, we’ve seen it adopted by Webflow, Hiive, and Pinecone to power changelogs, upgrade flows, and more.
Broadcasts
Broadcasts let you power one-time sends through Knock’s intelligent, stateful workflow engine.
This means you can send an in-app message first, then follow up with an email based on how the user interacted. It also means you can send tenant-aware broadcasts, such as pricing updates that reference a customer’s current plan.
In 2025 we saw customers like Headway, Vidyard, and Vercel use broadcasts to send pricing updates, terms of service updates, and one-off system alerts.
Dynamic audiences
For most of 2025, our customers targeted their workflows, guides, and broadcasts using our API or by building audiences via CSV upload.
With dynamic audiences, you can now build audience queries using the user properties you already store in Knock. Once a new audience (such as dormant users) is created, you can leverage it across Knock workflows, guides, and broadcasts.
Knock MCP server
Several years ago, we shipped the Knock CLI because developers told us they wanted to bring Knock into their codebase. To this day, we're one of the only customer engagement solutions to have this.
This year, we added the Knock MCP server to that developer toolkit, so you can work with Knock from your favorite MCP-compatible clients, like Claude Code and Cursor.
With these tools, we’ve seen customers work 10x faster and migrate large implementations from tools like Braze in days.
Our customers
These foundational products wouldn't have been possible without feedback and support from our customers.
Customers like Webflow, Headway, Hiive, and more helped shape these products into what they are today. And as we expanded the scope of what our product can do, we brought some fantastic customers onto Knock.
- Webflow uses Knock to power its email and in-app messaging, including its changelog, in-app inbox, and other use cases such as G2 review nudges.
- Nellis Auction uses Knock to batch its SMS notifications, leading them to double engagement while boosting cost efficiency.
- Hiive uses Knock to power its transactional messaging, in-app notifications and real-time badges, and in-app nudges and announcements.
If you follow us on Linkedin or X, you may have seen our “Powered by Knock” customer posts. We’re grateful to play a role in the products of all of these great companies.
What’s next
With these additions, we realized we were building something bigger than notification infrastructure.
We call it customer engagement infrastructure. Tooling to unify your product, marketing, and transactional messaging in one platform, with developer-first tooling to manage and govern the system at scale and bring it to AI-native tooling.
We’re fired up about this expanded scope and the trust our customers have placed in us, and we’re excited to execute on this vision with the releases we have planned in the new year.
Here’s some of what you can expect from us in 2026.
Data activation and data management
As our customers bring more of their messaging into Knock, they want more data in our product to coordinate that messaging.
We’re hard at work on two big releases that will change data activation in Knock in a big way.
Incoming webhooks
Bring any generic webhook into Knock and map it to any action in our system. Identify users when they’re added to your Supabase DB. Kick off onboarding flows when they authenticate into your product with WorkOS or Clerk. Update their tenant when they convert to a paid customer in Stripe.
Schema management
As you bring more data into Knock, you need a way to (i) clean and manage it and (ii) provide context about that data for use with our agents. Schema management will help you do both.
Knock agent mode
We’ve seen developers working 10x faster in Knock with our CLI and MCP server because it brings Knock to AI models. Now we’re bringing the AI models to Knock.
With agent mode, you’ll be able to build and update workflows, templates, and grep across all of Knock and make bulk updates from within the Knock dashboard.
Core product investment
We’ll also continue to invest across the entire product. Custom permissions. An in-app toolbar for debugging guides. More workflow functions for working Knock data.
See you in 2026
We’re grateful for another year of building and shipping the best product we can to our customers.
We have big plans for 2026. We’re excited to come back from the break and bring Knock to engineering, growth, and marketing teams everywhere.
As always, thanks for your continued feedback and support.
Knock on 🤘
Sam + Chris