The 9 best OneSignal alternatives in 2026.
Methodology: every free tier and paid entry price below was checked against the vendor's own pricing page in Aug 2026; "best for" reflects our hands-on read of each product's shape, not a lab benchmark. Pricing moves — recheck before you decide.
If you want a genuinely free, OneSignal-compatible push product, OpenPush is free to 1M MAU per app — Journeys, Live Activities and Intelligent Delivery included — and sends on your own provider credentials. FCM is free and unlimited but a raw pipe with no dashboard. Pushwoosh unlocks every feature free to 1,000 MAU. The rest — Novu, Knock, Courier, SuprSend, MagicBell — are excellent notification-infrastructure tools for developers, but they're event/message-priced and inbox-centric, not drop-in push replacements. Full disclosure: OpenPush is ours. We tell you exactly what each one does below.
It's almost always the MAU math.
OneSignal's Growth plan bills $19/mo + $0.012 per monthly active user — each mobile subscription record with a session in the billing period, opted in or not. At 100K MAU that's ≈$1,219/mo; at 1M MAU ≈$12,019/mo. The meter runs on app usage, not on your marketable audience. And from October 1, 2026, OneSignal has told customers its Free plan is capped at 1,000 MAU — above that you upgrade or you leave.
The free plan is generous on subscriber count but tight on the product: one 2-step Journey, six segments, two data tags, a 10K web-push cap, 30 days of dashboard reporting history. Most teams switch when the bill goes vertical or a gate blocks a launch — not because the product is bad. So the honest question isn't "what's cheapest," it's "which tool fits how you actually send." Here's the field.
OpenPush
Yes, it's oursThe OneSignal-compatible push platform — iOS, Android & web push, segments, templates, Journeys, Live Activities, Intelligent Delivery, delivery analytics — free forever to a million MAU per app.
Full disclosure: we build OpenPush, so treat this entry as the house pick — and judge the product, not the pitch. It exists because we were the OneSignal customer with millions of subscribers and a bill that stopped making sense, so we rebuilt the dashboard faithfully (same segment vocabulary, same reports) on the free APNs/FCM pipes, then added the things the paid tiers gate. The REST-key importer, which preserves subscription status, makes switching about an afternoon. See the full comparison →
Firebase Cloud Messaging
Google's raw push-delivery API — the free pipe that most of these platforms (OpenPush included) send through underneath.
The catch is what it isn't. FCM has no audience dashboard, no segmentation, no journeys, no scheduling, and only basic delivery analytics. It's transport, not a product — you build the campaign layer yourself. Free and bulletproof if you have the engineering appetite; a lot of work if you don't.
Pushwoosh
An omnichannel engagement platform (push, in-app, email, SMS, WhatsApp) with single-metric MAU pricing — the closest like-for-like OneSignal competitor.
Every feature is unlocked on free — journeys, segmentation, A/B testing — but only to 1,000 MAU, and above that you're back on a per-MAU meter ($13/1,000 MAU) that scales the same way OneSignal's does. A real product, same billing shape.
Novu
Open-source notification infrastructure — a unified API, a workflow engine, and an embeddable in-app inbox for developers.
Open in a different sense than we are. Novu is open at the source: you can read it, fork it and run it yourself. OpenPush is open at the mechanism: we don't publish the server, but your notifications go out on your own APNs and FCM credentials with nothing of ours in the delivery path and no per-message fee. Source-openness gives you control of the code; mechanism-openness gives you control of the pipe and the bill. Novu is also event-priced notification infra with an in-app inbox at its centre, not a drop-in mobile-push replacement — reach for it if you want a code-first, multi-channel backbone, and know that running it is then your job.
PushEngage
Web & mobile push aimed at marketers, publishers, and e-commerce — strong in the WordPress/WooCommerce world.
Cheap and web-first. The 200-subscriber free tier is tiny, but paid plans are inexpensive and the WordPress plugins are frictionless. Great for site-based re-engagement; a weaker fit if mobile app push is your center of gravity.
Knock
Developer-facing notification infrastructure — a hosted API and workflow engine that routes across channels with an in-app feed.
Polished, engineer-first infra — not a marketer's campaign tool. The jump from free to a $250/mo Starter is steep for small teams, but the developer experience and cross-channel routing are excellent for product notifications in B2B SaaS.
Courier
A multichannel notification API with a template studio — design once, route across email, push, SMS, in-app, and chat.
The fairest pricing shape here — pure pay-as-you-go per send, no seat fees, no minimum. It's a notification-routing layer with a nice template studio rather than a push-marketing product; ideal when transactional multichannel is the job.
SuprSend
Notification orchestration — one API to trigger multi-channel notifications with routing, batching, preferences, and an in-app inbox.
Strong on preferences and batching — the in-app inbox and preference management are the draw. Free tier carries SuprSend branding until you pay; like the other infra tools, it's orchestration for developers, not a push-campaign console.
MagicBell
A notification inbox — API plus prebuilt UI components for a drop-in in-app inbox, with multichannel delivery behind it.
Buy it for the inbox UI. If your goal is a polished in-app notification center without building the front-end, MagicBell's prebuilt components are the fastest path. It's the least push-marketing-oriented on this list — an inbox first, a delivery channel second.
Free tiers & pricing, side by side.
| Product | Free tier | Paid from | Model | Source published | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenPush | Free to 1M MAU / app, every feature | Services for the largest teams | Free, uncapped | SDKs only (Oct 10) | Push product |
| OneSignal | Gated; 1,000 MAU cap from Oct 1, 2026 | $19/mo + $0.012/MAU | Per mobile MAU | No | Push / omnichannel |
| FCM | Free & unlimited | — | Free transport | No | Delivery pipe |
| Pushwoosh | 1,000 MAU, all features | $13 / 1k MAU | Per MAU | No | Omnichannel |
| Novu | 10k runs / mo | $30/mo | Per workflow run | Yes · MIT | Notif. infra |
| PushEngage | 200 subscribers | ~$14/mo | Per subscriber | No | Web/mobile push |
| Knock | 10k messages / mo | $250/mo | Per message | No | Notif. infra |
| Courier | 10k sends / mo | $0.005 / send | Per send | No | Notif. infra |
| SuprSend | 10k notifs / mo | $110/mo | Per notification | No | Notif. infra |
| MagicBell | 1,000 deliveries / mo | $249/mo | Per delivery | No | Inbox |
All figures from each vendor's public pricing page, checked Aug 2026; the OneSignal Free-plan cap from its customer notices. Push products vs notification-infra is a real distinction — pick by how you send, not by list price alone.
When each choice is right.
You need omnichannel today
If SMS and email in the same console, or contractual SLAs with 24/7 support, are non-negotiable right now, OneSignal's paid tiers are real, mature products. The MAU meter is the price of that breadth.
Notifications are a dev concern
If your need is transactional, multi-channel, in-app-inbox-shaped product notifications owned by engineering, the infra tools are a better model than a push-marketing console — event-priced and API-first.
You want push that's free
If mobile/web push is the job, you're tired of the MAU meter, and you want your sends going out on your own provider credentials with nothing in between, OpenPush is free to 1M MAU — Journeys and Live Activities included — with an importer built for exactly this move.
Frequently asked.
What's the best free OneSignal alternative in 2026?
For a genuinely free, OneSignal-compatible push product, OpenPush is free to 1M MAU per app and sends on your own APNs and FCM credentials. If you only need raw delivery and will build your own dashboard, FCM is free and unlimited. Pushwoosh unlocks every feature free up to 1,000 MAU.
Is there an open-source OneSignal alternative?
Novu (MIT) is the real answer if you mean published source you can run yourself — notification infrastructure with an in-app inbox, priced per workflow run. OpenPush is not open source: it's a hosted service and only the client SDKs are published. What OpenPush gives you instead is an open mechanism — your own APNs and FCM credentials, no delivery network of ours in between, no per-message fee, and a full data export on a button. Pick Novu if you want to own the code; pick OpenPush if you want drop-in push without a subscriber meter.
Why do teams leave OneSignal?
Usually the per-MAU math — $0.012 per monthly active user means the bill scales with app usage, not opt-ins — plus free-plan gates on journeys, segments, data tags, and a 30-day dashboard reporting window that block a launch at the wrong moment. From October 1, 2026 the Free plan is capped at 1,000 MAU outright.
How hard is it to migrate off OneSignal?
With OpenPush, about an afternoon: paste your REST key (or export the CSV), import with subscription status preserved, swap the SDK keys (both SDKs can run at once during rollout), and verify with a test device. Nobody gets re-permissioned.
Push with nothing in between, and free.
Free forever to 1M MAU · your own provider credentials · importer built for switching · read the pledge