Knock is developer-first messaging infrastructure that provides APIs and SDKs for engineering teams to build custom notification systems. Intercom is a customer messaging platform designed for support, marketing, and sales teams to engage with customers through live chat, in-app messaging, and email.

Knock focuses on transactional product notifications and programmatic messaging workflows, while Intercom specializes in conversational messaging, live chat, and customer support workflows.

While Intercom can send transactional messages, it's primarily built for conversational messaging and customer support. Developers often find Intercom's workflow builder limiting for complex notification logic, whereas Knock provides programmatic control through APIs and code-based workflows designed specifically for transactional product and customer messaging use cases.

Yes, Knock provides native in-app messaging components and SDKs that enable you to build custom in-app experiences. Unlike Intercom, which provides a pre-built chat widget, Knock gives you complete control over the design and functionality of your in-app messaging, allowing you to build priority inboxes, multiple feeds, and toast notifications that match your product's design system.

Unlike Intercom, which prioritizes ease of use for support and marketing teams, Knock is purpose-built for developers, so initial setup requires some technical involvement.

From there, non-technical users can easily create messaging workflows, manage notification templates, edit and send one-time messages, ship in-app messaging, and view analytics without any developer involvement.

Intercom offers extensive analytics for conversation engagement and support metrics. Knock also provides extensive engagement analytics across channels, plus end-to-end observability for delivery tracking, message debugging, and API logs.

Knock is built as infrastructure to handle billions of notifications with guaranteed delivery and idempotency. While Intercom can handle large volumes, it's optimized for conversational messaging and support workflows rather than real-time, event-driven notifications at scale.

Both platforms support email, push, SMS, and in-app notifications, but only Knock allows integration flexibility with 25+ messaging providers, allowing teams to take advantage of unique benefits of individual services.

For example, AWS-native companies can save costs by using Amazon SES to send transactional emails or use Twilio's infrastructure to reach 180+ countries via SMS.

Unlike Intercom, Knock also provides native integrations with chat apps, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp, plus webhooks for custom channels. Knock's channel management is API-driven, while Intercom uses a visual interface.

Yes, many companies use both platforms. It's common to see engineering teams using Knock to handle transactional messaging (alerts, updates, collaboration messages) while support teams use Intercom to manage conversational messaging and customer support.

However, this separation can lead to inconsistent messaging over time, and using two systems ends up costing more than just using Knock to handle all product and customer messaging.

Knock typically offers more cost-effective pricing for engineering teams building notification systems. While Intercom requires tiered subscriptions based on seats and features, Knock provides transparent usage-based pricing starting at $0 for the first 10,000 notifications, making it accessible for startups and growing companies, with volume discounts for larger enterprise organizations.

All plans include unlimited data ingestion and unlimited channels with no onboarding or service fees, and overages are only incurred by volume of sent messages.

Both platforms offer enterprise compliance features. Knock provides SOC 2 Type 2 certification and supports GDPR/CCPA requirements. Intercom offers similar compliance but typically requires enterprise contracts.

Knock's infrastructure approach gives engineering teams more control over data handling.

Knock is designed for rapid implementation by developers, with most teams shipping notifications within hours using pre-built components. Intercom typically requires weeks of migration, configuration, and training for support and marketing teams.

If your engineering team needs to ship quickly, Knock's developer experience provides faster time-to-value.

Most engineering teams migrate from Intercom to Knock within 2-4 weeks, depending on notification complexity. Knock's responsive support team help accelerate the process.

The investment pays off quickly through improved developer productivity and reduced maintenance.