Where Knock's free tier stops
Knock Knock's free tier stops at 10,000 messages per month, 500 guide active users per month, and 500 AI agent credits per month. What stays free is broad: unlimited notification workflows, unlimited broadcasts, unlimited delivery channels, unlimited team members, batch and delay notifications, built-in multi-tenancy, and Google SSO. That makes it workable for small deployments, but the monthly caps are the limit that pushes higher-volume teams to compare alternatives. Once your usage regularly exceeds any of those three quotas, the free plan no longer fits.
Switch table
| Knock | Engagespot | Pusher | Svix | Autohive | PubNub | Activepieces | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| messages included | 10,000 per month | 10,000 event triggers per month | 200,000 messages per day | 50 messages per second | No message quota listed | 1M transactions monthly | No message quota listed |
| guide active users | 500 per month | No guide active user quota listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
| AI agent credits | 500 per month | No AI agent credits listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
| workflows or flows | Unlimited notification workflows | Unlimited workflows | Not listed | Dispatch, Stream, and Ingest included | Unlimited agents and automation workflows | Not listed | 10 free active flows |
| delivery channels | Unlimited delivery channels | Unlimited channels | Push and realtime channels included | Embeddable webhooks UI and connectors included | Not listed | 1M push notifications per month | Not listed |
| team seats or users | Unlimited team members | 2 team members | Not listed | Not listed | Unlimited seats | Not listed | Unlimited seats |
| Card required | - | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| First paid tier | - | Growth from $250/month | Startup $49/month | Professional from $490/month | Lite $20/mo USD | Starter $98/month | Plus $16 per month, billed yearly |
The alternatives
Engagespot
FTV 66 / 100Engagespot's free plan includes 10k event triggers per month, unlimited channels, unlimited workflows, 2-way notifications, US/EU regions, multi-tenancy, 2 environments, 2 team members, email support, and 7 days of feed retention. For teams that care more about workflow breadth and channel mix than assistant-style guide or AI credits, the free tier covers a lot of the notification stack without a card. It is still a capped tier, so it is best for small-scale production use or internal tooling. Switch if you want a notification infrastructure setup with more environments and delivery flexibility than Knock's free allowance gives you.
- Beats Knock: 2 environments and 2-way notifications
- Falls short: Lower free monthly volume than Knock on the core quota metric, with no guide active user or AI credit allowance
- Who should switch: Switch if you need multi-environment notification infrastructure and do not need Knock's guide or AI features.
Pusher
FTV 71 / 100Pusher's free Sandbox plan includes 200,000 messages per day, 100 concurrent connections, standard support, Functions, and no mention of a credit card requirement. It is the strongest option here for raw realtime throughput, and it is the closest fit if your use case is live updates, pub/sub messaging, or push delivery rather than engagement workflows. Compared with Knock, it trades away workflow and guide features for far more headroom on message volume. If your app is hitting a ceiling on message traffic and you want a hosted realtime backend, this is a practical alternative to try first.
- Beats Knock: Messages per day
- Falls short: No guide active users or AI agent credits, and it is not built around notification workflows
- Who should switch: Switch if your main constraint is high realtime message volume, not customer engagement workflows.
Svix
FTV 78 / 100Svix's free plan includes Dispatch, Stream, and Ingest, 50 messages per second, 30-day payload retention, an embeddable webhooks UI, connectors and transformations, and a 99.9% uptime SLA, with no credit card required. It is free infrastructure for webhook delivery and inspection, so it fits teams that need reliability, debugging, and API-first webhook handling more than user-facing notification workflows. Compared with Knock, it gives you stronger operational guarantees and webhook tooling, but it is narrower in product scope. Choose it if your messaging problem is webhooks, not broadcasts, guides, or multi-channel engagement flows.
- Beats Knock: 99.9% uptime SLA and webhook tooling
- Falls short: It does not provide Knock-style guide users or AI credits, and it is centered on webhooks rather than engagement messaging
- Who should switch: Switch if your notification stack is really webhook infrastructure with observability and retries.
Autohive
FTV 61 / 100Autohive's free tier includes unlimited seats for unlimited users, access to top AI providers, 350K monthly credits, 1GB storage, community support, documentation access, and no credit card required to start. For teams that want AI-assisted internal automation across many users, the free plan is much larger on collaboration than Knock's free tier. It is not a notification platform, but it can replace some workflow-heavy internal ops use cases where AI agents matter more than messaging channels. If your real need is agent-driven task automation for a team, Autohive gives far more free headroom on usage and seats.
- Beats Knock: Unlimited seats for unlimited users
- Falls short: It is not a notification API, so it lacks Knock's message, broadcast, and delivery-channel focus
- Who should switch: Switch if your main requirement is team-wide AI automation rather than customer notifications.
PubNub
FTV 75 / 100PubNub's free plan includes up to 200 MAU, 1M transactions monthly, 1GB of data storage for 7 days, 5 test Serverless Functions with 7-day runtime, 1M push notifications per month, and no credit card required. It is built for realtime apps that need messaging, presence, storage, and push in one place, so it fits teams closer to product interactivity than marketing-style engagement. Relative to Knock, it offers much more room on push notifications and a broader realtime platform, but it does not give you Knock's guide active user model or notification workflow tooling. Use it when the app itself is realtime.
- Beats Knock: 1M push notifications per month
- Falls short: No guide active users or notification workflow features like Knock's
- Who should switch: Switch if you need a realtime application platform with push and data primitives instead of engagement orchestration.
Activepieces
FTV 61 / 100Activepieces' free tier includes 10 free active flows, unlimited runs, AI agents, unlimited MCP servers, unlimited tables, and community support. It is a strong choice for builders who care about automation logic and AI-enabled workflows more than notification delivery. The free plan is especially good when you need to connect SaaS apps, APIs, webhooks, and AI services without paying for seats or hitting run limits. Compared with Knock, it offers more direct workflow automation headroom, but it does not provide a notification-specific layer for channels, broadcasts, or guide users. Choose it for automation first, messaging second.
- Beats Knock: Unlimited runs
- Falls short: It is workflow automation, not a notification platform with messages, broadcasts, or guide users
- Who should switch: Switch if you want free automation capacity and AI agents rather than customer notification infrastructure.
Two quick picks
Engagespot
Engagespot is the closest drop-in for teams already building notification infrastructure. It keeps the same general shape, with workflows, multiple channels, multi-tenancy, and team collaboration, while replacing Knock's message and AI quotas with a similar free trigger cap.
Pusher
Pusher gives the most free headroom on the main volume axis, with 200,000 messages per day and 100 concurrent connections. For teams whose bottleneck is throughput rather than workflow features, that is the largest free operating room here.
Frequently asked questions
Which alternative is closest to Knock for notification workflows?
Engagespot is the closest match because it stays in notification infrastructure, supports unlimited workflows and channels, and adds multi-environment support. It is the least disruptive switch if you already think in terms of notification pipelines.
Which alternative has the highest free messaging capacity?
Pusher has the largest free volume on the main traffic axis, with 200,000 messages per day. That makes it the best fit when volume is the first constraint.
Which alternative is best if I only need webhooks?
Svix is the most focused webhook option. It includes dispatch, stream, ingest, retention, an embeddable UI, and a 99.9% uptime SLA, so it fits webhook-first teams better than a general notification platform.
Do any of these alternatives require a credit card to start?
No credit card is required for the alternatives listed here when that field is present. For Knock, no card is required on the free plan as well.
Bottom line
For the most common case, Engagespot is the best first alternative to try. It stays closest to Knock's notification-infrastructure model, keeps unlimited workflows and channels, and adds multi-environment support and 2-way notifications. If you are mainly replacing Knock because the free tier feels tight on volume, Engagespot gives a similar free starting point without forcing a big change in how you build. If your main problem is pure throughput, though, Pusher is the better second look.
Read the full listing for Knock. Scores use the FTV methodology at /ftv. Browse more alternatives on /alternatives, or head-to-head comparisons on /compare.