What is Novu

Novu is a developer-first product built for engineers looking to deliver a notifications platform for products. Novu simplifies the complexities of notification management for developers who can then empower the product and marketing teams that need to edit and maintain notification content and copy. Novu supports a variety of common notification channels out-of-the-box, including Email, SMS, Push, Inbox, and Chat.

The Novu Cloud Platform provides an intuitive internal user interface, embeddable UI end-user components, and a code-first workflow capability.

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Quick start

Start building with Novu by following our Quick Start guides. These guides provide step-by-step instructions for integrating Novu into your application.

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Notification types

Novu supports different notification types, including user-generated and machine-generated notifications.

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Machine generated

• Triggered by some automated action—think a container pod scaling event.
• Notify one or more end users (which can be internal users, of course!).
• Often can be voluminous, so digests are helpful.

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Product notifications

• Triggered by end-user interactions and events within your product.
• Notify one or more subscribers.
• Typically transactional, such as order updates, password resets, account verifications, or login/OTP codes.
• Can also be used to provide product updates, such as new features or bug fixes.

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Key differences

• Product notifications are triggered by user activity, while promotional notifications are sent at the discretion of the marketer.
• Product notifications are typically more transactional in nature, while promotional notifications are more marketing-oriented.
• Product notifications are often sent to all subscribers, while promotional notifications can be targeted to specific audiences.

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Who is Novu for?

How you use and get started with Novu depends on your role. While it’s initially implemented by engineering and development teams, Novu unifies everyone in an organization that authors, creates, sends, manages, and measures results from notifications being sent to end users. Novu empowers engineers to deliver notification platforms for product teams.

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Novu for engineers

Novu empowers developers and engineering teams to quickly deliver a fully extensible notifications platform for product teams to create captivating notification experiences.

We provide the following proven stack for developers to simply integrate notifications into their products:

• Code-first Notification Framework Opinionated, yet flexible, Framework for building and managing notification workflows.
• JSON Schema Based Controls to craft a no-code visual editor to enable non-technical team members to modify content and behaviour.
• Prebuilt, customisable UI components for in-app user notification feeds and preference experiences.
• Integration with multiple delivery providers, allowing you to continue using your preferred vendors with Novu.
• Scalable, reliable Novu Cloud SaaS infrastructure developed from scratch to meet the demands of high-volume notification delivery and storage (think hundreds of millions of notifications).
• Observability for delving into the lifecycle of a notification’s success or failure. Eliminate guesswork of how, when, and why a user receives a notification.
• Comprehensive documentation, implementation guides, recipes and illustrative examples.
• Compliance and security for safely managing your data.
• Open source provides transparency you can trust, cultivates community contributions for fast improvement, and enables you to deploy and self-host a Novu instance into any environment of your choosing.

Notification content can be written in a variety of common content tooling, including React, Vue-email, MJML, and more. Content can also be customized and hydrated using any datasource.

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Novu for product teams

We are well aware of the friction that often exists between engineering and product teams, and have built features that allow product teams to customize notification experiences easily and safely—without the risk of breaking important integrations and logic.

Product teams can craft beautiful notification content and campaigns in any content framework of their choice.

• Modify and manage notification UIs that engineers have built via the Novu Framework.
• Gain valuable insights into user engagement with notifications via logs and analytics.
• Use your preferred notification content editors.
• Craft impactful notification messaging, verbiage, and cadences.
• Run experiments to improve user experience without requiring engineering effort.

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Novu for end users

Once implemented, most end users will not be aware that it’s Novu behind the scenes, other than that they now receive notifications where and when they expect them.

The Inbox Component is an embeddable component that, when included in your app, enables users to view and set their own notification preferences—such as channel, language, timezone, and more.

Novu ensures fast delivery and beautiful notification experiences for end users regardless of the channels involved.

With Novu, your app users receive instant notifications via email, Inbox alerts, SMS, push notifications, and chat.