When it makes sense to use notification infrastructure, you’ll need to evaluate which platform best meets your needs. You’ll want to start by auditing your current and future requirements.

Evaluate your current state

Map out your notification workflows

List every templatized notification your business sends today, including messages for transactional, behavioral, system, and social purposes. Also document the channels each notification uses to understand which are most critical to your system.

Volume projections

Then, calculate the number of messages sent per month across channels, accounting for growth and seasonality. The platform you choose should be able to handle notification spikes like Black Friday as well as scale steadily with your user base over time.

Also, since many vendors in the space offer some type of user-base pricing model, it’s a good idea to understand how many of your users receive notifications in a given month. Is this user base growing or stable, and if it’s growing, is it predictable?

The more concretely you can answer these questions, the easier it will be to understand your overall cost.

Technical requirements

You’ll also want to understand your hard technical requirements. There are a few things to consider:

  • Latency needs. Trading alerts need sub-second delivery, while weekly digests can queue for hours.
  • Geographic reach. Global apps need providers with worldwide SMS coverage and email infrastructure.
  • Compliance requirements. Various industries require compliance with different regulations, such as healthcare needing HIPAA compliance and finance needing audit trails.
  • Integration depth. Some platforms are API-only, while others provide SDKs, UI components, and no-code tools.

Team capabilities

Finally, you should understand who on your team will manage notifications, considering your team's technical expertise and desired level of autonomy.

Engineering-only platforms require developers for every change, while no-code tools lack the flexibility most engineering teams need to ship a notification system that meets all of the company’s needs.

Platforms with developer-first features and visual editors that enable non-technical roles like product managers and marketers to update templates independently often work best.

Evaluate your future needs

Architecture and scalability

Look for distributed queue systems (such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS) that can handle traffic spikes. Evaluate how platforms handle backpressure—what happens when downstream providers slow down? Multi-region deployments ensure that notifications are sent even during data center outages.

Performance benchmarks

You’ll want to verify the following:

  • Message processing latency (p50, p95, p99)
  • Maximum throughput per channel
  • Queue depth during peak traffic
  • Time to delivery across different channels
  • API response times under load

Scaling mechanisms

Make sure you understand how each platform scales. Do they auto-scale during traffic spikes? What are the hard limits?

Some platforms handle billions of messages monthly, while others struggle to handle millions. Request load test results or run proof-of-concept tests at projected volumes. During this stage of diligence, it’s also a good idea to look at what other types of customers a platform supports: do they have similar volumes and patterns as your business?

Provider redundancy

Single provider dependencies create risk. If SendGrid goes down, can the platform route email through AWS SES? Check for multi-provider support per channel and automatic failover capabilities. Platforms should detect provider degradation and route around failures.

Integration and developer experience

The benefit of adopting a third-party system in many cases involves speed of implementation, and regardless of the type of messaging you’ll send, these systems will need to integrate with your existing product. As a part of your evaluation, it’s a good idea to get a sense for how easy that will be for your technical staff to accomplish.

Integration experience

Well-designed APIs have consistent patterns, clear error messages, and predictable behavior:

  • RESTful design with proper HTTP status codes
  • Webhook payload consistency
  • Idempotency support for safe retries
  • Batch operation capabilities
  • Rate limit communication via headers

SDK ecosystem

Native SDKs should exist for your tech stack. But quality matters more than quantity—a well-maintained SDK for your primary language beats poorly-maintained SDKs for twenty languages. Check GitHub activity, issue response times, and documentation quality.

Testing infrastructure

Development velocity depends on testing capabilities:

  • Sandbox environments that mirror production
  • Test API keys that don't send real messages
  • Webhook testing tools or ngrok integration
  • Load testing provisions
  • Template preview across channels

Migration complexity

Evaluate the migration path from your current system:

  • Can you run both systems in parallel?
  • API compatibility with existing notification triggers
  • Bulk import for templates and user preferences
  • Historical data migration requirements
  • Rollback procedures if issues arise

Implementation considerations

Decide between code-based and UI-based template management. Code-based templating offers version control and review processes but requires deployments. UI-based enables rapid iteration but needs governance. Hybrid approaches store templates as code but allow UI overrides.

Data architecture

You’ll have to decide between:

  • Full payload: Send complete user profiles and data with each notification
  • Reference only: Send user IDs and let the platform fetch data
  • Hybrid approach: Send immutable data, reference dynamic data

Each approach has tradeoffs in consistency, performance, and complexity. Full payload ensures point-in-time accuracy, but it increases the API payload size. Reference-only requires the platform to access your systems.

Preference synchronization

Determine the source of truth for user preferences:

  • Platform manages all preferences with webhook updates to your system
  • Your system remains authoritative with periodic syncs
  • Bidirectional sync with conflict resolution

Make sure to consider edge cases: What happens if sync fails? How do you handle conflicting updates? Can users update their preferences while notifications are in flight?

Monitoring and observability

Plan your monitoring strategy:

  • Which metrics matter for your use case?
  • How will you correlate notification events with business metrics?
  • What constitutes an incident requiring immediate response?
  • How will you debug individual notification failures?

Set up alerts for both technical metrics (delivery rates and latencies) and business metrics (engagement rates and unsubscribe rates). Ensure your existing monitoring tools can ingest platform data.

How to evaluate notification platforms

Now that you have a good understanding of your needs, you can begin to evaluate and compare the different notification infrastructure platforms available to you.

Typically, you want to evaluate these platforms on the following factors:

  • Cross-channel orchestration: The platform should support sending notifications across email, push, SMS, in-app, and Slack from a single API. Channel fallbacks and routing rules should be configurable without code changes.
  • Developer experience: RESTful APIs with comprehensive SDKs. Real-time debugging tools and delivery logs. Clear documentation with implementation examples.
  • Template management: Version-controlled templates with localization support. Dynamic content personalization. Shared components across notification types.
  • Delivery intelligence: Batching, throttling, and digest capabilities. User timezone awareness. Channel-specific delivery optimization.
  • Scale and reliability: Published SLAs and uptime guarantees. Transparent pricing that scales predictably with volume. Multi-region infrastructure.

The top 5 notification infrastructure platforms

Below is a quick rundown of the top notification infrastructure platforms available, but check out Knock’s full post for an in-depth breakdown of each.

Knock

  • Strengths: Developer-first design, enterprise-grade scalability, comprehensive docs, and multi-language SDKs
  • Weaknesses: No hobby tier between free and $250/month Starter
  • Pricing: Free tier (10K notifications/month); Starter at $250/month (50K notifications); Enterprise custom pricing

Novu

  • Strengths: Open source (MIT license), self-hosting option, prebuilt UI components for notification centers
  • Weaknesses: Less mature for enterprise use cases, self-hosting adds maintenance overhead
  • Pricing: Free tier (10K notifications/month); Starter at $30/month (30K notifications); Team at $250/month (250K notifications); Enterprise custom pricing

Courier

  • Strengths: Visual drag-and-drop editor for non-technical users, A/B testing capabilities, fallback provider support
  • Weaknesses: Limited workflow flexibility, API not optimized for developer-first approach
  • Pricing: Free tier (10K notifications/month); Pro at $0.005/notification; Enterprise custom pricing

SuprSend

  • Strengths: Clean API design, quick setup process, real-time delivery tracking and observability
  • Weaknesses: Limited enterprise workflow capabilities, minimal frontend tooling
  • Pricing: Free tier (10K notifications/month); Essentials at $100/month (50K notifications); Business at $250/month (50K notifications plus advanced features); Enterprise custom pricing

Fyno

  • Strengths: 50+ built-in provider connectors, no-code workflow builder, dynamic routing based on user behavior
  • Weaknesses: Less flexible for custom product logic, limited SDK and language support
  • Pricing: Free trial only (50K API requests for 15 days); Paid at $250/month (200K notifications)

Ship cross-channel notifications with Knock

Notifications evolve from simple API calls to complex infrastructure challenges faster than most teams anticipate. What starts as a couple simple integrations evolves into a complicated system that typically requires months of engineering work before sending your first reliable notification, ongoing maintenance as providers change APIs, and constant iteration as new channels emerge.

A notification platform accelerates your time to ship while providing the reliability, scalability, and flexibility your users expect. The right platform becomes invisible infrastructure, allowing your team to focus on crafting the notification experience while the platform handles the complexity of delivery.

Knock provides the complete notification infrastructure outlined in this guide, encompassing multi-channel orchestration, intelligent routing, real-time delivery, and comprehensive analytics. If you'd like to try it out, you can sign up for a free account or chat with our team. 👋