Novu is an open-source notification infrastructure designed to help you implement notifications your users will love, without the effort of building and maintaining your own in-house notifications system.

Novu is designed with both developers and product teams in mind: it’s easy for developers to implement quickly, and simple for less-technical users to maintain with our intuitive dashboard.

You also can reffer to it as a Communication Infrastructure Layer (CIL), which is a layer that sits between your application and the user’s devices and channels.

how-novu-works

At Novu, we’re redefining how you engage users with notifications. Our platform offers the most flexible and customizable set of tools to deliver modern, seamless, and highly personalized notification experiences.

Whether you’re sending alerts, updates, or tailored messages, Novu enables you to design notification flows that adapt to your users’ preferences, across any channel, with ease.

We can break down the Novu platform into the following blocks:

API

The Novu API allows you to seamlessly integrate a comprehensive notification infrastructure into your product. It’s the only RESTful API you’ll need to manage notifications across all channels.

Workflows

In Novu, notifications are sent through workflows. Each workflow serves as a container for the logic and templates associated with a specific type of notification in your system.

Subscribers

Subscribers typically refer to users in your application. As workflows are triggered for subscribers, Novu stores the necessary data to send notifications across various platforms.

Channels

Channels in Novu represent the specific providers you’ve configured to send notifications, such as email, SMS, or push.

Actions

Workflows can include multiple action steps, enabling complex logic to create richer and more personalized notification experiences.

Preferences

Each workflow run is executed on behalf of a subscriber, and each subscriber can specify their preferences to receive notifications across a number of different criteria: channel types, individual workflows, and workflow categories.

UI components

Novu offers a collection of full-stack UI components that are customizable and can be easily embedded into your application.

Dashboard

The Dashboard provides an interface for managing workflows, notification templates, integrations, debugging, and more.

Framework

The Novu Framework is the underlying layer that allows you to build and manage advanced notification workflows with code, while providing no-code options for non-technical users to customize.

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