Evaluating Your Options

Choosing how to implement Slack and Teams notifications means understanding the landscape: building custom, using platforms, and what to expect from each approach.

The Platform Landscape

Several platforms specialize in notification infrastructure. They differ in capabilities and which use cases they optimize for.

Courier focuses on product notifications for B2B SaaS. Full Slack and Teams support through a unified API. Free tier includes 10,000 notifications/month. Pricing scales with usage. SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR compliant.

• Visual template designer
• Workflow automations
• Preference management
• Multi-tenant architecture
• Analytics and observability

Knock takes a similar developer-first approach with Slack and Teams support. Code-centric configuration, workflow orchestration. Starts at $250/month. Teams support less comprehensive than Slack.

Novu offers open-source, self-hostable infrastructure. Appeals to strict data residency requirements. Tradeoff: you handle infrastructure, scaling, security patches. Supports Slack but not Teams.

SuprSend provides Slack and Teams with transparent, usage-based pricing. Growing adoption, less comprehensive feature set than mature platforms.

MagicBell focuses on in-app notification feeds. Slack is secondary. No Teams support.

Customer.io and OneSignal focus on marketing automation and push notifications respectively. Slack support exists but workplace notifications aren't the primary focus. Neither supports Teams.

The Teams gap is notable. Only Courier, Knock, and SuprSend provide Microsoft Teams support. If your customers use Microsoft 365, this immediately narrows your options.

Why Courier

Full Slack and Teams parity. Both platforms get equal treatment, not one well-supported and the other as an afterthought. Same templates, routing logic, and analytics for both. When enterprise customers require Teams, you're ready without separate integration work.

Email-based targeting. Send notifications using email addresses you already have in your user database. Courier looks up the corresponding platform user and delivers. No Slack or Teams user ID mapping infrastructure needed.

Automatic template conversion. Design once in the visual designer, and Courier renders to Block Kit for Slack and Adaptive Cards for Teams. Preview both platforms before sending. You're not maintaining separate templates for every notification type.

True multi-tenancy. Each of your customers gets separate configurations, branding, and rate limits through Courier's tenant system. If you're building a product that sends notifications on behalf of thousands of companies, this foundation is essential.

Visual workflow builder. The Automations interface lets product managers set up batching rules, marketing adjust timing and frequency, and support configure escalation workflows. No code changes or deployments needed.

Comprehensive debugging. Query message logs by user, notification type, status, provider, time range, and other criteria. When a customer reports a missing notification, you have 13+ filter parameters to track down what happened.

Enterprise compliance built in. SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA compliance options, GDPR data handling, audit logging, and data residency controls come standard. Review Courier's security documentation during vendor evaluation without waiting for compliance features to be built.

Build vs Buy

Building in-house means implementing OAuth flows for both platforms, managing token storage and refresh, handling rate limits, building retry logic, maintaining templates in two formats, and keeping up with API changes. That's months of engineering time upfront, plus ongoing maintenance. And the work stays with engineering: every copy change, new notification type, or workflow adjustment requires developer involvement.

Using a platform means integration in weeks. The platform handles authentication, delivery reliability, and API updates. But the bigger shift is who can work on notifications. Product teams design templates and set up workflows in visual builders. Growth teams adjust timing and frequency without filing tickets. Marketing manages promotional messages alongside transactional ones. Engineers focus on integration points, not notification infrastructure.

Unified preference management becomes possible when transactional and marketing messages run through the same system. Users control all their notification settings in one place instead of managing separate preferences for product updates versus promotional content. This consolidation improves the user experience and simplifies compliance.

Build when: notifications are your core differentiator, you have compliance requirements platforms can't meet, or you're operating at massive scale.

Use a platform when: you need to ship quickly, you'll support multiple channels, your team is small, you want non-technical teams contributing to notification strategy, or notifications support your product but aren't what makes it unique.

Running a Pilot

Pick one notification type. Something important enough for real feedback but not so critical that failures create major problems. Budget approvals or project updates work well. Production incident alerts don't.

Limit to a subset of users initially. Define success criteria before starting: faster response times? Higher engagement than email? Positive feedback?

Run for at least a month to see patterns. Track metrics, gather qualitative feedback, scale gradually based on results.

Migrating from Custom Integrations

Common drivers: adding the second platform, reducing maintenance burden, enabling non-technical teams to update content.

Migration typically takes 1-2 weeks. Move authentication to the platform's OAuth flow, convert templates, update send logic to call the platform API. Historical data stays in Slack/Teams.

Test thoroughly in staging. Run both systems in parallel during transition if you want extra confidence.

Who's Using Courier

DroneDeploy (drone mapping software) needed notifications when map processing completed. Building a notification center would have consumed months.

"Notifications are not our core competency, so it made complete sense to integrate rather than build out and support our own implementation." — James Pipe, VP of Product

LaunchDarkly (feature management) uses Courier for approval workflows where engineers request changes and team members approve through action buttons.

"We were able to build the in-app notification experience that we wanted with excellent support and communication from the Courier staff." — Lucy Wonsower, Software Engineer

HiPages modernized their notification infrastructure by moving out of their monolith.

"It used to take four weeks to get a new message type into the monolith. Post Courier, it takes less than one day." — Clayton Bell, Head of Platform (Full case study)

Twilio chose Courier for internal operations when they deprecated their Notify API.

"We chose Courier because the depth of the inbox and multi-channel integrations allowed us to choose one notification platform for all products and teams at Twilio." — Raghav Katyal, Technical Lead (Full case study)

Getting Started

Week 1: Setup

• Sign up at app.courier.com
• Configure Slack and Teams integrations
• Install SDK: Node.js, Python, Ruby, or Go
• Send test notifications

Week 2: Templates and preferences

• Design templates in the visual designer
• Set up user preferences
• Configure routing rules

Week 3: Production

• Move credentials to secrets management
• Configure webhooks and monitoring
• Deploy and monitor

Week 4: Optimization

• Add automation workflows and digests
• Set up analytics
• Optimize based on metrics

Most teams move faster than this. You're integrating an SDK, not implementing OAuth flows from scratch.

Questions? Visit Courier docs or get in touch.