What is OneSignal?
OneSignal is a platform that delivers push notifications, in-app messages, and emails. It offers tools for targeting, automation, and analytics to help businesses manage and optimize their communication with users.
10 alternatives to OneSignal to consider
We’ll now look at alternatives to OneSignal - competing technologies that allow you to build realtime experiences for end-users.
Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet, serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform. Our product suite places composable realtime in the hands of developers. Simple APIs, use case specific SDKs and pre-built integrations, enables the creation of a host of live experiences - including live updates, chat, collaboration, notifications and fan engagement - with no infrastructure to build.
Key Ably features and capabilities
- Ably is underpinned by a globally-distributed network of datacenters and edge acceleration points of presence.
- Ably‘s SDKs provide a consistent and idiomatic API across a variety of supported platforms.
- Connect with pre-built integrations for Webhooks, Lambdas, databases, cloud services, observability tools and stream processors.
- Build the ultimate realtime app with our feature rich suite of products - Pub/Sub and notifications, Chat, LiveObjects, LiveSync, and Spaces.
- Guaranteed message ordering and delivery.
- Global fault tolerance and a 99.999% uptime SLA.
- 6.5ms round trip message delivery latency.
- Elastic scalability to handle millions of concurrent clients.
- Consumption-based, per-minute-billing, built for scale. Ably not only enables you to make the most of your budget, but also enjoy greater flexibility, faster build times and a quicker ROI.
Braze
Braze is a customer engagement platform for cross-channel marketing that provides email, SMS, mobile, and web push notifications, in-app messaging, and content cards. It also offers advanced features like personalization, realtime automation, A/B testing, analytics, and user segmentation.
CleverTap
CleverTap is a comprehensive customer engagement and retention platform offering push notifications, SMS, email, calls, in-app, and mobile and web messaging.
PushEngage
PushEngage is a push notification service for web and mobile. It offers segmentation, personalization, and advanced targeting.
Firebase Cloud Messaging
Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a free cross-platform messaging service for sending and receiving messages and notifications across platforms like iOS, Android, and the web via cloud-based infrastructure. It supports both upstream and downstream messaging.
Firebase
Firebase is a cloud-native backend by Google that allows developers to build mobile and web applications. Firebase services include Firebase Realtime data, Firestore database, authentication, and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), among others.
Pusher
Pusher is a managed pub/sub messaging service that provides hosted APIs and SDKs for adding realtime features to web and mobile applications. Pusher’s offers two products:
- Channels: WebSocket pub/sub messaging
- Beams: Programmatic push notifications for mobile and web
Amazon SNS
AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed notification service that uses the Pub/Sub model to provide message delivery from publishers to subscribers.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud platform that enables developers to build real-time communications features for their applications. It provides APIs for voice, SMS, video, WhatsApp, and other messaging services.
Airship
Airship is a customer engagement platform which includes push notifications, SMS, email, and in-app messaging. It enables businesses to deliver personalized and relevant messages at the right time, enhancing user experience and driving engagement and retention.
Disclaimer: The information on the alternatives presented here was based on documentation and resources freely available online and was last updated on 10 Jul 2026. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please let us know.
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections
