6 Best Notification Infrastructure for Modern Applications

Even since humanity stepped into the Internet era, notifications have become an intrinsic part of our lives that keep us delivering information about happening in the virtual world.

Notifications about pending emails, arriving orders, and received messages keep landing on our smartphones, and we can’t fathom how much we’ll miss out if it were not for them.

Undoubtedly, Notifications are what promptly deliver critical information on our devices and prevent important tasks from slipping out of our minds.

In the fast-moving world, users appreciate receiving alerts on several platforms, not just one. For instance, users would want to be notified about a delayed flight not just via SMS but also an email. Since individual APIs are required for every platform, the list keeps growing over the upcoming years. Things get nasty for the developers as they have to integrate and manage each API separately, which slows down the workflow.

Manually creating the notification infrastructure is a time taking process which diverts the developers from the core project and is bound to hamper the existing product codebase.

While notification infrastructure in your organization is a cumbersome task, implementing it is essential to deliver a seamless experience to your user base and boost user engagement.

To resolve the problem for developers, several pre-build notification infrastructures are available that connect several messaging platforms using a single API.

Easily deployable and offering notable notification delivery features such as automation, routings, and preferences, they can be your best bet if you want to provide a delightful notification experience to your customers without disrupting your project flow.

The finest of the notification infrastructures available are mentioned below.

Novu

Novu is an open-source notification infrastructure that employs a developer-centric approach to simplify the communication between the system and its users.

It integrates with all the messaging platforms like Twilio, SendGrid, MailChimp, and others using a unified API that efficiently manages all the notification channels like email, SMS, direct message, push, and web and delivers the preferred notifications to the users.

The API also plays a key role in reading template configuration, finding channels and providers, and sending notifications.

The engine manages the logical rules, such as priority, timing, and channel selection which are essential to route the notifications. It provides built-in protection to the missing variables, and its intuitive CMS supports advanced layout designing and system management capabilities.

Novu includes a management dashboard and a centralized place to deliver real-time updates to the developers and enhance notification delivery. Being an open-source technology, Novu is free to use and offers better security and transparency than its counterparts.

Knock

Knock is the most powerful notification system, capable of scaling with the users’ demands. Its unified API effortlessly handles the most complex of use cases and offers flexibility in providing user engagement, managing cross-channel workflows, and choosing notification preferences.

Knock is built with a series of primitives that help create notification logic and transmit high relevancy notifications at the time preferred by the users.

The key features of Knock are as follows:

• Notification batching groups the messages together and notifies the user once instead of sending a notification for every message.
• The delay function allows you to send conditional reminders to avoid spamming the users with notifications about the messages already read.
• The preferences model allows the users to set the notification preferences they wish to be notified about.
• Knock’s objects facilitate the non-notification workflows for per-resource feeds and Slack channel integrations.

Courier

Courier provides a robust notification infrastructure to the product and engineering teams to help fascinating design notifications intrigue the customers. It offers the smartest and the most hassle-free way to build multi-channel reports for all the platforms, be it – web, desktop, and mobile apps.

Courier follows the Design Once Deliver to Many approaches, which makes it possible to design notifications using a single API and deliver them to several channels such as push notifications, direct messages for Slack or Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email. That eliminates the need to integrate APIs for each provider separately.

Courier offers the following features:

• A notification designing studio to define meaningful notifications using the drag-and-drop method.
• The data logs and cross-channel engagement tracking features deliver in-depth insights into your notification’s performance.
• Use the delivery rules engine to route the messages to the notification channel they are intended for.

SuprSend

SuprSend is the next infrastructure on the list that skillfully manages product notifications across different channels. Offering a single API for all the channels, it is equipped with an intuitive dashboard that enables the developers to send cross-channel notifications to the end users and scale with the requirements.

Designed for the engineering teams and product managers, its comprehensive data analytics module provides cross-channel actionable insights in a centralized location.

SuprSend offers the following features:

• Reliable and low-latency notification infrastructure that scales with your business.
• Actionable insights and change logs that help debug channel errors.
• Event-based integration of a single API to broadcast notifications across multiple channels.
• Notification integrations across multiple channels such as SMS, email, mobile and web push, and slack.
• Graphical templates help design and edit notifications without needing to code.
• Automated delivery node to optimize the notification delivery process instead of bombarding users with notifications.
• Centralized dashboard to analyze, audit, and debug the notifications from one place.

Raven

Raven is a sophisticated infrastructure for businesses that intend to design and manage meaningful notifications to deliver a top-notch notification experience to their customers across channels like SMS, Email, Push, WhatsApp, Slack, and many more.

The platform unites more than 40 messaging apps like Twilio, Messagebird, Gupshup, SendGrid, Firebase, and many more with a single API, thus simplifying the notification delivery process.

Its insightful dashboard in a unified setup allows you to derive actionable insights about the performance of notifications across different messaging channels. This approach also simplifies the management of templates, logs & delivery metrics, thus empowering the product teams to optimize the notification delivery and reduce the redundancy of messages.

Managing all the app notifications from one place cuts down the overall cost and reduces the risk involved in the message delivery procedure by alerting the managers about failed delivery. Raven also provides notifications history across different channels thanks to the advanced filters, an in-depth analysis of the logs is possible.

Amazon Simple Notification Service

Lastly, let’s not forget Simple Notification Service by Amazon, a web service that supports application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication between distributed environments, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications.

Offering features like pub/sub messaging, SMS, email, and mobile push notifications, Amazon SNS automates the push-based many-to-many messaging in A2A pub/sub communication medium to deliver high throughput.

Amazon SNS uses Topics, a logical access point that acts as a communication channel for broadcasting messages to numerous subscriber systems- the prominent ones being Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, HTTPS endpoints, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

It supports message batching, allowing publisher systems to send ten notes in a single API request. Likewise, message filtering delivers only those notifications to the customers to which they have subscribed.

Amazon SNS minimizes data loss by storing the message data in multiple availability zones. The web service is very cost-efficient and is the best option for implementing simplified and low-cost messaging infrastructure, especially in mobile messaging scenarios.

Last Words

Meaningful notifications are the driving force behind user engagement of modern applications, and the comprehensive notification infrastructures listed above help deliver them to the users reducing the engineering complexities simultaneously. Choosing the infrastructure that works for you is quite a challenge, but it comes down to the features you need, available resources, and your budget.