The choice between building your own Slack 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 Slack notification system

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

Reasons to build your own Slack notification system

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

Unique compliance requirements

Certain financial and government regulations have specific infrastructure and security mandates that may require an in-house build. Some regulations can also require senders to handle and store all messaging themselves.

Custom infrastructure needs

Some organizations may need to make custom infrastructure optimizations, such as related to their traffic patterns, whereas some may want to just leverage their existing infrastructure investments and engineering expertise.

Cost savings at extreme scale

If you're sending billions of Slack notifications monthly, per-notification pricing becomes prohibitive. The savings of sending your own messages will start to outweigh the cost of the additional engineering investment you'll have to make.

Product-specific technical requirements

Some organizations may need to build patterns unique to their own product, while others may need to build deep integration with proprietary systems that can't be exposed to third parties.

Workspace-specific requirements

If Slack is a core channel for your organization, you may need specific white-label requirements by workspace. If you need to handle separate usage tracking, permission sets, SLAs, OAuth flows, or other features per workspace, you may need to build your own system.

In the end, building your own Slack notification system is rarely the right choice. The engineering investment is substantial. You're not just building notification delivery, but also OAuth flows, token management across multiple workspaces, rate limiting and retry logic, message deduplication, security infrastructure, observability systems, 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 months to build in-house, wrapped in developer-friendly APIs that get you to production quickly.

Reasons to use 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.

Platforms abstract away the channel-specific complexity and let you focus on the business logic: what to send, when to send it, and who should receive it.

Managed OAuth and token storage

Instead of building OAuth flows and storing tokens securely across multiple workspaces, platforms provide embeddable UI components that handle the entire authentication lifecycle. With SlackKit, the SlackAuthButton component manages the OAuth flow, stores tokens securely, and handles connection status.

<SlackAuthButton
  slackClientId={process.env.SLACK_CLIENT_ID}
  redirectUrl={process.env.REDIRECT_URL}
/>

The platform handles token encryption, renewal, and all the edge cases around workspace reinstalls and permission changes. When Slack deprecates an API version, the platform updates its integration. Your code doesn't change.

Channel selection without building UI

Letting users choose which Slack channels receive notifications requires calling Slack's API, handling pagination for workspaces with thousands of channels, supporting search, and persisting selections. Platforms provide components like SlackChannelCombobox that handle this entire flow, including support for private channels and multi-channel selection.

<SlackChannelCombobox
  slackChannelsRecipientObject={{
    id: "repository-1",
    collection: "repositories",
  }}
/>

The component queries available channels, provides search, shows which channels are already connected, and stores the selections as channel data on your recipient objects, so there are no API calls to write and no UI to maintain.

Channel coverage and orchestration

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

  • Slack notifications with workspace-specific optimizations
  • Email delivery with template management and rendering
  • SMS with global carrier support and compliance
  • In-app notification feeds with real-time updates
  • Push notifications for mobile devices

But it's not just about supporting channels, it's about orchestrating across them intelligently. Send Slack 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

Built-in preference management

User preferences become a first-class concept. Users control notification frequency, severity thresholds, quiet hours, and channel routing through a preference center that works across all notification types.

The platform checks preferences before sending, batches notifications when users request digests, and respects Do Not Disturb windows automatically. You don't build preference storage, checking logic, or digest scheduling. You just trigger workflows, and the platform applies user preferences.

Template management and versioning

Instead of hardcoding message templates in your application code, platforms provide visual template editors where you can design Slack messages using Block Kit, preview them, and version them independently from your application deployments.

When marketing wants to change the notification copy, they can edit the template in the dashboard. There's no code change and no deployment needed, the new template just goes live immediately. Plus, templates support Liquid templating for dynamic content:

Hi **{{ recipient.name }}**,
 
There are {{ total_activities }} new comments on {{ page_name }}.
 
{% for activity in activities %}
- From **{{activity.actor.name}}**: "{{activity.comment.body}}"
{% endfor %}

For more complex layouts, you can use Slack's Block Kit framework with JSON templates, and the platform's editor supports this with Liquid for dynamic content.

Enterprise-grade reliability

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 Slack's API has issues. The platform handles retries with exponential backoff, manages rate limits across providers, and ensures your messages get through.

Platforms handle the operational complexity of notification delivery:

  • Rate limiting and retries: Automatic backoff when hitting Slack's limits.
  • Failover and queueing: Notifications queue and retry when Slack's API is down.
  • Deduplication: Prevent sending the same notification twice.
  • Unified dashboards: Track delivery rates, failures, and user engagement across all channels.

Full observability

When a customer reports missing notifications, you see exactly what happened: filtered by preferences, API failure, or Do Not Disturb mode. One dashboard covers your complete notification system, eliminating the need for separate monitoring of Slack, email, push, and SMS.

Analytics and optimization

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

  • Real-time dashboards showing delivery, open, and click rates
  • Data aggregation across all of your different message types
  • 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 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.

The build vs buy decision

Building custom makes sense in specific scenarios:

  • You're sending notifications only via Slack and have no plans to expand. If Slack is your only channel and you're confident it will stay that way, the overhead of a platform might not be worth it. But most products eventually need multi-channel support.
  • Your notification logic is highly custom and doesn't fit standard patterns. Some domains have unique requirements that platforms don't support well. If your notification system is a core differentiator and competitive advantage, custom implementation gives you maximum control.
  • You have spare engineering capacity and want to own the entire stack. Some teams prefer to build infrastructure in-house for learning, control, or architectural reasons. This is a valid choice if you're willing to invest the ongoing maintenance effort.
  • You need complete control over OAuth flows and workspace management. If you have specific compliance requirements or need custom workspace isolation that platforms can't provide.
  • You have specific compliance requirements that platforms can't meet. Some industries have unique regulatory needs that require custom implementations.

Platforms make sense when:

  • You need to ship quickly. Teams using platforms report shipping Slack integrations in less than a week instead of months. The faster you ship, the sooner you get user feedback and iterate.
  • You'll support multiple notification channels. Once you need Slack plus email, or Slack plus push, the platform ROI becomes clear. Building and maintaining three integrations costs more than using one platform.
  • Your team is small, or notification infrastructure isn't core to your product. If you're a five-person startup, spending a month building notification infrastructure is a month not spent building your actual product. Platforms let small teams ship sophisticated notification systems without hiring a dedicated infrastructure engineer.
  • You want production reliability without building production infrastructure. The retry logic, rate limiting, token management, observability, and security required for production reliability take significant engineering effort. Platforms provide this as a service.
  • You want to avoid the ongoing maintenance of Slack API changes and deprecations. Slack regularly updates their APIs, and platforms handle these changes automatically.

The most expensive infrastructure is the infrastructure you build once and maintain forever. Notification infrastructure platforms convert these ongoing costs into a predictable expense. You gain reliability, faster shipping, and multi-channel support, allowing your team to focus on your core product.

Building from scratch teaches you how notifications work. This knowledge is valuable. But for most teams, using that knowledge to evaluate and implement a platform is more pragmatic than maintaining custom infrastructure forever.

Whether you build or buy, the goal is the same: deliver timely, relevant, actionable notifications to your users through the channels they prefer. Platforms just let you reach that goal faster and with less ongoing engineering investment.

Ship Slack notifications with Knock

Building a production-ready Slack notification system requires figuring out OAuth, managing tokens, handling rate limits and retries, managing message states, and more. Whether you're sending internal updates, customer-facing alerts and announcements, or a mix of both, the complexity often scales faster than most teams anticipate.

That's why we built Knock to handle the infrastructure complexity so you can focus on building the right workflows and crafting the right messages for your users. With best-in-class reliability, observability, and customization, you get enterprise-grade Slack notifications without the enterprise-grade headaches.

Whether you're planning to send notifications across many channels or only Slack, Knock can help. If you'd like to try it out, you can sign up for a free account or chat with our team. 👋