Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

ntfy (pronounced “notify”) is a simple HTTP-based publish/subscribe notification service. It lets apps, servers, and scripts send push notifications to phones, desktops, and web browsers using straightforward HTTP requests.

Key Features

• Publish messages to topics via HTTP PUT/POST
• Topics are created dynamically by publishing or subscribing
• Web app for browser subscriptions with desktop notifications
• Push delivery to mobile clients (Android and iOS apps are available)
• Works well for automation and server-to-user alerts without complex integrations

Use Cases

• Send server and backup job notifications from shell scripts or cron jobs
• Application alerting (deployments, monitoring events, CI results) via a simple REST-style interface
• Personal notification hub for homelab events and device automation

Limitations and Considerations

• If used without accounts/reserved topics, topic names function like shared secrets and should be hard to guess

ntfy is a pragmatic choice when you want a minimal, reliable notification pipeline based on plain HTTP. It is well-suited for automation scenarios and for teams or individuals who prefer a simple pub-sub model over heavy messaging platforms.

Apprise is a Python-based notification library and CLI that pushes messages to a wide range of services using simple URLs. It is designed to unify cross-service notifications and run self-hosted. Written in Python and available as both a library and a command line tool, it supports configuring multiple destinations from a single configuration.

Key Features

• Simple API with URL-based configuration
• 120+ supported notification services
• CLI and API for Python apps; self-hosted
• Handles images and attachments; asynchronous sending
• Lightweight with minimal dependencies

Use Cases

• Centralized alert routing for systems and teams across multiple channels (Slack, Discord, Email, SMS, etc.)
• Automated notifications from scripts, CI pipelines, and monitoring dashboards
• Multi-channel incident alerts and status updates for operations teams

Conclusion

Apprise provides a practical, single solution to dispatch notifications across many services from Python apps or via its CLI, enabling self-hosted, multi-channel alerting.

ejabberd is an open-source, scalable real-time messaging platform built on Erlang/OTP. It provides an XMPP server for chat and presence, and can also act as an MQTT broker and SIP service for broader real-time and IoT workloads.

Key Features

• XMPP server with support for group chat, publish-subscribe, and many protocol extensions
• MQTT broker functionality for lightweight device and IoT messaging
• SIP service support and interoperability options for real-time communications
• Native clustering designed for high concurrency and large deployments
• Security-focused design with modern TLS support and configurable authentication options
• Multiple deployment options including packages and container images

Use Cases

• Team or consumer chat systems using XMPP (including multi-user chat)
• IoT telemetry and device messaging using MQTT
• Real-time communication backends that combine messaging and signaling needs

Limitations and Considerations

• Full capabilities often depend on correct selection and configuration of modules and protocol extensions
• Running large clusters typically requires operational expertise in tuning, monitoring, and database/storage choices

ejabberd is a mature, extensible platform suited to organizations needing a reliable messaging core at scale. Its multi-protocol approach makes it useful for both classic chat deployments and modern IoT-oriented messaging architectures.