Deciding how to deliver your push notifications

The choice between building your own push notification system and using a managed service is one of the most critical decisions you'll make. Let's examine when each approach makes sense.

Option 1: Build your own push notification system

For companies with highly sophisticated or unique needs, building your own push notification system might be tempting to have greater control, especially if existing providers may not be able to meet your specific needs.

Some cases where it might make sense to build your own system include:

In the end, building your own push notification system is rarely the right choice. The engineering investment is substantial. And you're not just building notification delivery, but also token management, provider integration, preference systems, analytics, and ongoing maintenance.

Option 2: Use a dedicated notification platform

Modern notification platforms have evolved far beyond simple message delivery. They provide comprehensive infrastructure that would take years to build in-house, wrapped in developer-friendly APIs that get you to production quickly.

Benefits of a dedicated notification platform

Speed and developer experience

The most immediate benefit is time to market. What typically takes months of engineering effort can be accomplished in days. Modern platforms provide SDKs for every major language, detailed documentation, and support for your entire development lifecycle, from local testing to production deployments. Features like environment management mean you can test changes in staging and roll them back instantly if needed, without the complexity of managing multiple infrastructure deployments.

Channel coverage and orchestration

Today's users expect to be reached on their preferred channels. A robust platform handles:

• Push notifications for iOS and Android with provider-specific optimizations
• Email delivery with template management and rendering
• SMS with global carrier support and compliance
• In-app notification feeds with real-time updates
• Chat integrations for Slack, Teams, and Discord

But it's not just about supporting channels, it's about orchestrating across them intelligently. Send push first, fall back to email if undelivered, and ensure users never receive duplicates across channels.

Advanced workflow capabilities

Complex notification logic becomes manageable with visual workflow builders and powerful primitives. Need to batch notifications for users who receive lots of updates? Built in. Want to delay notifications until business hours in the user's timezone? Configured with a click. These platforms provide:

• Batching and digest functionality to prevent notification fatigue
• Conditional logic based on user attributes and behavior
• Time-based delays and time-zone aware scheduling
• Channel failover strategies

Enterprise-grade infrastructure

When you choose a managed platform, you're leveraging infrastructure that has been battle-tested across thousands of companies. This means 99.9% uptime SLAs, automatic scaling during traffic spikes, and redundancy across regions. Your notifications get delivered even when AWS has an outage in a single region. The platform handles retries with exponential backoff, manages rate limits across providers, and ensures your messages get through.

Analytics and optimization

Understanding notification performance is crucial for improving engagement. Platforms provide:

• Real-time dashboards showing delivery, open, and click rates
• Cohort analysis to understand user segments
• A/B testing tools for optimizing content and timing
• Raw event data access for custom analysis

You can answer questions like "Which notification types drive the most engagement?" and "What's the optimal time to reach users in different time zones?" without building complex analytics infrastructure.

Security and compliance

Enterprise platforms invest heavily in security, so you don't have to. They maintain SOC 2 Type II certification, offer HIPAA-compliant infrastructure options, and ensure GDPR compliance. Features like SSO integration, role-based access control, and detailed audit logs come standard. Your security team will appreciate not having to review yet another custom-built system.

Team collaboration

Perhaps most importantly, modern platforms democratize notification management. Product managers can update copy without deploying code. Customer success teams can view notification history when debugging issues. Marketing can A/B test messaging without engineering support. This cross-functional enablement accelerates your entire organization.

Modern notification platforms like Knock provide the flexibility of custom-built systems with the reliability and speed of a managed service. You get enterprise-grade infrastructure, comprehensive features, and the ability to ship notifications in days instead of months, all while saving your engineering team time to focus on building your core product.

How to choose a push notification provider

All push notification providers are not created equal. Choosing the right one for your company will depend on several factors, including but not limited to:

• Reliability. They need to ensure that notifications are delivered consistently without delays or failures.
• Scalability. Can handle both small and large volumes of notifications without performance degradation.
• Rich content support. Allows for including images or custom data payloads to make notifications more engaging.
• Platform support. Offers cross-platform support for various devices and operating systems.
• Customizability. Allows developers to customize notification appearance, behavior, and user interactions.
• Cost. Offers competitive pricing, with plans that can scale with the needs of the business.

The top 6 push notification providers

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

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

Amazon SNS

• Strengths: Enterprise-scale infrastructure on AWS, high durability and reliability, seamless AWS ecosystem integration, robust IAM and KMS security
• Weaknesses: Complex setup for AWS newcomers, feature overhead for push-only use cases, fragmented pricing across service components
• Pricing: Free tier with 1M notifications; $0.50 per million thereafter (additional AWS service charges apply)

Expo

• Strengths: Dead-simple React Native setup, no native code required, unified iOS/Android API
• Weaknesses: Expo vendor lock-in, limited customization vs. native APIs, React Native only, no web support, migration complexity
• Pricing: Push notifications free; platform pricing at $99/month (Production) or $999/month (Enterprise)

Pusher Beams

• Strengths: Privacy-first design, straightforward SDK integration, reliable infrastructure, actionable engagement analytics
• Weaknesses: Complex tiered pricing, still dependent on APNS/FCM for delivery
• Pricing: Free tier (1K subscribers); Paid tiers from $29/month (10K) to $399/month (250K subscribers)

PubNub

• Strengths: Real-time messaging + push notifications in one platform, globally distributed infrastructure, extensive SDK support, highly customizable delivery
• Weaknesses: Feature overhead for push-only use cases, complex channel-based concepts, rate-limited free tier
• Pricing: Free tier (200 MAUs or 1M transactions/month); $49/month (1,000 MAUs, 3K transactions per MAU); custom pricing above

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)

• Strengths: Completely free, Google-scale infrastructure, advanced targeting and segmentation, multi-language server SDKs
• Weaknesses: Limited iOS customization vs. native APNS, 4KB payload restriction, complex Firebase Console UI
• Pricing: Free (other Google services may have separate charges)

Ship push notifications that work

Ready to accelerate your notification strategy? Knock provides everything you need to power best-in-class notifications across in-app, email, SMS, push, chat apps, and more. With flexible APIs, powerful workflows, and enterprise-ready infrastructure, you can deliver the notification experience your users expect without the complexity of building it yourself.