Courier vs OneSignal: 2026 notification platform comparison

Last updated: September 2026

Short answer

In a Courier vs OneSignal comparison, Courier wins on multi-channel messaging at one flat price, and OneSignal wins on mobile push depth. The OneSignal free plan now caps mobile push and in-app messaging at 1,000 monthly active users per organization. OneSignal is still the stronger pick when push is the product, with the broadest mobile SDK list and iOS Live Activities.

• Courier bills $0.005 per send on any channel, first 10,000 sends a month free (courier.com/pricing). OneSignal bills three meters: $0.012 per mobile MAU, $0.004 per web push subscriber, $1.50 per 1,000 emails after 20,000 free.
• Existing OneSignal accounts hit the 1,000 MAU cap on October 1, 2026. Above it, mobile push and in-app messaging pause until you upgrade.
• Courier adds Slack, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp, and sits on top of 50+ delivery providers. OneSignal is one of them.

How we compared

Every fact here comes from each vendor's own pricing page or docs, read on September 2, 2026, and linked inline so you can check it. Claims we couldn't confirm first-party are left out. The weights: delivery and architecture 35, pricing at high volume 25, orchestration and testing 20, in-app and preferences 20. That favors platforms treating every channel as first class, the bias to declare up front. If push is your only channel, reweight and OneSignal moves up.

Courier vs OneSignal at a glance

Where OneSignal wins

Mobile SDK coverage. OneSignal ships SDKs for Android, iOS, Fire OS, Huawei, React Native, Expo, Flutter, Unity, .NET MAUI, Cordova, Capacitor, and web. If your app is built in Unity or .NET MAUI, that's the whole decision. Courier's client SDKs cover React, JavaScript, iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter, and stop there.

iOS Live Activities and in-app messaging. OneSignal supports Live Activities on iOS 16.1 and up, with push-to-start on iOS 17.2 and SDK 5.2.0 and up. It also has in-app modals and banners on the same targeting rules as push. Courier has neither. For a delivery tracker with a live tile on the lock screen, that's a real gap.

Free web push. Web push stays on OneSignal's Free plan under the existing limits, at up to 10,000 subscribers per send. If web push is your whole strategy, that costs nothing.

Per-user pricing when you send often. At $0.012 per mobile MAU, OneSignal charges the same whether that user gets one push or fifty. A daily marketing cadence is cheap on that model and expensive on any per-send model, including ours.

Where Courier wins

One platform for both audiences. You don't have to pick between a platform for engineers and a platform for your marketers or success team. Courier is one platform for both. Everything in the UI is on the API: journeys, templates, brands, routing, preferences, audiences, tenants, users, and translations are first-class API objects. A marketer builds a journey by clicking, and an engineer manages the same object as code. An AI agent drives it through the API or the MCP server.

One price, one meter. A push, an email, an SMS, an in-app message, and a Slack message all cost $0.005 to send. No per-seat fee, no channel add-on, and no bill that grows because your app gained monthly users you never messaged. On OneSignal you reconcile three meters plus a custom SMS quote.

Channels past push and email. Slack, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp are first-class Courier channels. OneSignal has none of them. In B2B, where the alert your customer actually reads lands in Slack, that matters more than another push SDK.

Your providers stay yours. Courier runs on top of 50+ delivery providers, OneSignal included, with automatic failover. If SendGrid has a bad hour, the message goes out through the backup, and swapping a provider is a settings change rather than a release.

The message a user never got. Some of your users never receive a push at all, because they declined the permission prompt. Courier routing walks a channel list in order and stops at the first one that delivers. A user who declined push still gets the email.

Preferences and an inbox you don't build. Courier gives you a hosted preference page, a preference center as an embeddable web component, and a drop-in inbox that syncs in real time. Preferences are enforced on every send. OneSignal's frequency capping is Enterprise only.

Testing that ships. Experiments run 2 to 10 template variants at one send point inside a journey, with per-variant metrics. OneSignal keeps standard A/B on Free and Growth and reserves multivariate testing for Professional and up.

Twilio, LaunchDarkly, CircleCI, and Nav run their customer messaging on Courier.

Pricing

Courier, from courier.com/pricing as of September 2026. Three tiers. Developer costs nothing and covers 10,000 sends a month, with Journeys, Broadcasts, the MCP server, the CLI, and every SDK. Business meters at $0.005 a send, the same rate on every channel, billed as you go with no ceiling on volume. It also turns on AI Translations, the AI Agent node, and cross-device email testing. Enterprise is quoted on your volume and adds an SLA, EU data residency, and RBAC. SOC 2 compliance and HIPAA certification are listed on the same page.

OneSignal, from onesignal.com/pricing: Free is $0, Growth starts at $19/mo, and Professional and Enterprise are custom and annual. Growth adds $0.012 per mobile MAU and $0.004 per web push subscriber. It gives you 20,000 emails a month and then charges $1.50 per 1,000, and puts SMS and RCS on a custom quote. Journeys are capped at 5, segments at 10, and reporting history at 90 days.

The two models cross at a fixed point. $0.012 divided by $0.005 is 2.4, so OneSignal's per-MAU rate is worth 2.4 Courier sends per user per month. Send fewer and Courier is cheaper. Send more and OneSignal is. That 2.4 ignores OneSignal's $19 base, which lifts the real crossover slightly at lower MAU counts.

One thing to watch: MAU counts any mobile subscription with at least one session in the billing cycle, opted in or not. With opt-in rates near half, you're paying for users who cannot receive a push.

Worked example, multi-channel at 25,000 mobile users. Each user gets 2 pushes and 1 email a month.

• OneSignal: $19 base, plus $300 for the MAU, plus $7.50 for the 5,000 emails past the 20,000 free. About $326.50 a month across two meters, SMS still unquoted.
• Courier: 50,000 pushes plus 25,000 emails is 75,000 sends. The first 10,000 are free, so 65,000 at $0.005 is $325 a month on one meter. SMS, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, and the inbox bill at that same rate.

Within a rounding error of each other. The difference isn't the total, it's how many meters you reconcile and what happens the month you add a channel.

What changed in the OneSignal free plan?

The OneSignal free plan now caps mobile push and in-app messaging at 1,000 monthly active users per organization. The count is summed across every app in the org, so three small apps share the 1,000. The cap starts September 1, 2026 for new accounts and October 1, 2026 for existing ones. Above the cap, mobile push and in-app messages pause until you upgrade. Web push, email, and SMS keep working under the existing plan limits. Mobile push used to be uncapped on Free.

Who it hits and how. OneSignal's announcement gives you warnings at 75%, 90%, and 100% of the threshold and 24 hours to upgrade. After that, mobile push and in-app messages stop sending.

What does OneSignal Growth cost next to Courier?

Growth is $19/mo plus $0.012 per mobile MAU. Courier's Business rate is $0.005 per send. Comparing them needs a send frequency. Here it is at 4 pushes per user per month and again at 2, with every Courier figure at the full rate:

Read that honestly. At a marketing cadence of 4 pushes per user per month, OneSignal Growth is cheaper at all three volumes. The gap widens the more you send. At a product cadence of 2 or fewer, Courier is cheaper at all three. Above 50,000 MAU, OneSignal directs you to its team for custom pricing, so treat $1,219 as a list-price ceiling, not a quote.

Can you keep OneSignal and add Courier on top?

Yes. OneSignal is a supported provider in Courier, so your app keeps its OneSignal SDK and device tokens and Courier calls OneSignal to deliver the push. You add routing, preferences, journeys, and the other channels above it. If the October 1 cap is forcing a decision, the smaller invoice is the wrong thing to optimize. Ask which channels you will need next year.

When to choose OneSignal

• Push and in-app are your primary channels and you send frequently to the same users.
• You need Unity, .NET MAUI, Cordova, Capacitor, or Huawei support, or iOS Live Activities.
• Web push is the strategy and you want it free.

When to choose Courier

• You send on three or more channels, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, or WhatsApp.
• You want one rate per send and no bill tied to how many users opened your app.
• You need an in-app inbox, a preference center, automatic provider backup, or multi-tenant templates without building them.

Related comparisons

• Top push notification platforms
• Courier vs Knock
• Courier vs Novu
• Courier vs Twilio
• Courier vs SendGrid
• Courier vs Customer.io

Start free with 10,000 sends a month at courier.com, or book a demo to walk through a migration off OneSignal.