Novu Cloud

Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Novu Cloud

A curated collection of the 2 best self hosted alternatives to Novu Cloud.

SaaS notification infrastructure for developers to create, manage and deliver multi-channel product notifications (email, SMS, push, in-app) using templates, orchestration workflows, integrations and delivery tracking.

Alternatives List

#1
Novu

Novu

Novu is an open-source notifications platform with a unified API, workflow orchestration, and embeddable in-app inbox for email, SMS, push, and chat.

Novu screenshot

Novu is an open-source notifications infrastructure that helps teams build and operate a multi-channel notification system through a unified API and workflow engine. It includes embeddable components for an in-app inbox and user preferences, plus integrations for common delivery providers.

Key Features

  • Unified API for orchestrating notifications across in-app inbox, email, SMS, push, and chat channels
  • Embeddable, real-time inbox (notification center) component for web apps
  • Notification workflow engine with conditional routing and step-based orchestration
  • Digest engine to batch multiple events into a single email or SMS notification
  • User preferences component to let end users control notification settings
  • Provider integrations for email, SMS, push, and chat (e.g., Slack and other connectors)

Use Cases

  • Add a real-time notification inbox to a SaaS product without building a full notification center
  • Orchestrate transactional notifications across email, SMS, push, and chat from a single workflow
  • Create digests for periodic summaries (e.g., weekly activity reports) to reduce notification noise

Limitations and Considerations

  • Open-core model: some functionality is available only in the Enterprise Edition under a commercial license

Novu is a good fit for teams that want an API-first notification platform with a built-in inbox UI and workflow orchestration. It reduces the operational complexity of managing multiple delivery providers and channels while keeping notification logic centralized.

38.4kstars
4.2kforks
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#2
Notifo

Notifo

Open-source multi-channel notification service with REST API, management UI, templates and channel abstraction for email, web, push and SMS; built with ASP.NET Core and React.

Notifo screenshot

Notifo is an open-source, multi-channel notification service for applications, e-commerce and publishing scenarios. It provides a REST API and a management UI to create templates, manage users and subscriptions, and deliver notifications across channels.

Key Features

  • Rich REST API with OpenAPI-style documentation for creating events, users and subscriptions
  • Management UI for notification templates, users, projects, subscriptions and settings
  • Email template support with MJML and Liquid-style templating
  • Channel abstraction with adapters for Email (Amazon SES), Web (SignalR / sockets), Web Push, Mobile Push (Firebase) and SMS (MessageBird)
  • Reliable delivery with retry mechanisms, queues and schedulers for undelivered or unconfirmed notifications
  • Topic-based subscription model (hierarchical topic paths) and per-topic user preferences
  • Tracking of read/confirmed notifications and delivery reporting
  • Web plugin / overlay to embed notifications into client applications

Use Cases

  • Customer alerts and marketing notifications for e-commerce (price drops, order updates)
  • Real-time notifications for collaboration and task management systems (project/task events)
  • Publishing and news delivery where users subscribe to topics or categories for updates

Limitations and Considerations

  • Project is marked beta: some channels/features (notably mobile push and email integrations) have limited production usage
  • Currently relies on MongoDB as primary datastore; multi-database support is planned but not complete
  • Provider ecosystem is limited out of the box (specific providers implemented; adding new email/SMS providers requires development)
  • Tests and automated API/UI test coverage are limited and further hardening of queues/schedulers is recommended

Notifo is suitable for teams wanting a self-hostable notification platform with topic-based subscriptions and multi-channel delivery. It combines an ASP.NET Core backend and a React/TypeScript frontend and is intended for integration into web and mobile applications.

845stars
82forks
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Why choose an open source alternative?

  • •Data ownership: Keep your data on your own servers
  • •No vendor lock-in: Freedom to switch or modify at any time
  • •Cost savings: Reduce or eliminate subscription fees
  • •Transparency: Audit the code and know exactly what's running