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 realtime infrastructure for AI, chat and live apps. It’s trusted by 7k+ companies and powers more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform. We run the delivery layer, so ordering, reconnects and failover are handled for you. Simple APIs and use case specific SDKs mean there’s no infrastructure to build or maintain.
Key Ably features and capabilities
- Performance: 6.5ms message delivery latency within a region, and a 37ms global median round trip.
- Integrity: Each publisher’s messages arrive in order at every subscriber. Clients that reconnect within two minutes resume automatically, and History covers longer gaps.
- Reliability: Designed for 99.999999% message survivability, with each acknowledged message stored in multiple physical locations.
- Availability: 7+ years without a global outage. Regional incidents are routed around automatically across 12 regions and 750+ edge locations. 99.999% uptime SLA on Business and Enterprise.
- One platform, six products: Pub/Sub, AI Transport, Chat, Spaces, LiveObjects and LiveSync share the same guarantees.
- Integrations and SDKs: Pre-built integrations for Kafka, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and Datadog, and SDKs for 20+ languages.
- Pricing: Priced by monthly active users, with every product in every package. Free for up to 500 MAUs; Pro from $29 a month, billed annually.
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 2 Nov 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:
- Up to 500 monthly active users (MAUs)
- Every Ably product and protocol
- No credit card required
