OneSignal is a popular customer engagement platform mainly known for its push notification capabilities. It also supports other channels like email, SMS, and in-app messaging.
However, larger teams often decide to look for alternatives to OneSignal that offer:
- Access to more channels like WhatsApp, on-site, and digital ads.
- Engagement and personalization tools for websites and mobile apps.
- Other advanced functionalities for personalization and omnichannel marketing automation.
In this guide, we’ll explore the 9 best OneSignal alternatives and competitors, including:
- Insider
- Braze
- Iterable
- WebEngage
- MoEngage
- Airship
- CleverTap
- iZooto
- PushEngage
The first seven options are versatile omnichannel platforms. They’re a good choice for larger businesses looking to expand beyond OneSignal’s limitations and leverage more channels and advanced personalization tools.
The final two are simpler push notification solutions. They’re perfect for small businesses or individuals looking to reach their customers only via push notifications in a simple, cost-effective manner.
1. Insider
Insider is our AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. Over 1200 enterprise brands like Puma, Toyota, CNN, Coca-Cola, and Unilever rely on it to:
- Reach customers on 12+ channels.
- Create personalized customer experiences across these channels to drive conversions, revenue, and retention.
- Stitch together every single customer interaction to build a clear picture of customers’ behaviors, interests, needs, and preferences.
- Consolidate their martech stack to improve efficiency, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and drive a higher marketing return on investment (ROI).
- And much more.
Customers and industry experts consistently rank Insider as the top solution provider in categories like:
- Marketing automation (by G2).
- Personalization engines (by Gartner).
- Omnichannel marketing platforms (by IDC).
Next, we’ll explore why Insider can be a great alternative to OneSignal if you’re looking to take your customer engagement efforts to the next level.
Benefit #1: Access to 12+ channels and advanced personalization tools
Insider gives you unmatched channel breadth — from email, SMS, and WhatsApp to on-site, mobile apps (iOS and Android), digital ads, and much more.
This ensures you can reach and engage customers on their preferred touchpoints. Just as importantly, our platform lets you personalize your efforts across these channels for maximum relevance and engagement.
For example, here are some elements and channels you can personalize with our platform:
- Web and mobile app product recommendations through various recommendation strategies — like location-based bestsellers, frequently purchased together, or new arrivals. Our AI can also combine different strategies to achieve the best-possible results. Example: Avon used our product recommendations to achieve a 78% increase in conversions.
- Emails by easily adding customers’ names, birthdays, cart items, or personalized product recommendations in each email to increase open and clickthrough rates. Plus, our platform supports AMP emails, so you can create web-like experiences that allow customers to browse items, answer questions, and make reservations without leaving your emails.
- Messaging channel communications across SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and more. You can send promotional messages, transactional updates, price drop alerts, back-in-stock alerts, and event reminders. You can also have AI-powered, two-way conversations at scale to market, sell, and answer customers’ questions quickly.
- Web and mobile push notifications, including recurring, carousels, cart reminders, in-stock alerts, and many others. These can be personalized to drive engagement and revenue in a cost-effective way. Example: Marks & Spencer used our web push notifications to achieve a 15.1% cart recovery rate, which is 353x higher than the industry average.
- Site search results via Eureka — our AI-powered site search and merchandising tool. This is a great way to improve conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and increase average order value (AOV) by ensuring all visitors find what they’re looking for as fast as possible.
For a deeper dive into Insider’s broad channel support and personalization capabilities, check out our guide: How to achieve personalization at scale.
Benefit #2: AI-powered omnichannel marketing automation.
Besides just getting access to a plethora of channels, Insider’s customer journey builder lets you create and automate personalized campaigns across these touchpoints.The process is controlled via a simple drag-and-drop editor that anyone can use. You can also leverage one of our many premade templates to launch campaigns as quickly as possible.
For example, you can trigger automated workflows or entire omnichannel campaigns via:
- Events, which can be any actions on your site or app, such as page visits, add-to-cart events, or completed purchases.
- Attribute changes, like a non-regular customer suddenly visiting a product three times a week.
- Price drops.
- And more.
From here, you can select channels, automation triggers, conditions, wait times, and much more. We’ve explored many journey orchestration strategies and ideas in the following guides:
- The full guide to marketing automation (Platforms & examples).
- 8 proven eCommerce marketing automation strategies and tools.
- How to use a customer journey builder to boost revenue (with examples).
Additionally, you can rely on our AI-powered tools for fast campaign creation and automatic optimization based on customers’ needs and preferences. These tools include:
- Send-Time Optimization and Next-Best Channel Selection, which analyze user behavior to determine the optimal send times and channels for each message.
- A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, which analyzes the results of your A/B tests and automatically guides users to the winning variants based on a metric you’ve selected beforehand (e.g., like open rates, conversion rates, revenue, and so on.)
- Sirius AI which can build campaign segments, journeys, text, and images using text prompts. You can provide simple text prompts with your end goal and our Generative AI will do the heavy lifting of creating customer segments, omnichannel journeys, campaign copy, and images in a matter of seconds.
For a real-life example of Insider’s omnichannel potential, check out our case study with NA-KD.This brand unified their data in our eCommerce CDP to get a single source of truth for all customer-focused initiatives.
Then, NA-KD’s digital marketing team used our platform’s broad channel reach to launch hyper-targeted campaigns across email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and app push. This allowed them to reach customers with the right messages, on the right channels, and at the right times — e.g., while they were browsing the website, chatting on WhatsApp, or scrolling through social media.
Using this new approach NA-KD generated a 25% increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and a 72x ROI in 12 months.
Benefit #3: World-class customer success team
As an enterprise-grade solution provider with 1200+ employees, Insider consistently delivers fast, high-quality customer service across the globe. That’s why customers rank Insider as the best solution when it comes to ease of use, ease of setup, quality of support, and time-to-value.
In a nutshell, our experts help you through every step of platform onboarding and management, including:
- Setup, migration, and deployment: Our teams ensure you deploy Insider as fast as possible at no extra setup cost. They help you involve the right commercial and technical stakeholders in the process.
- Strategy development and implementation: The growth managers can look at your analytics and customer behavioral data before kick-off. That way, they can give you actionable tactics that can drive results as fast as possible.
- Problem resolution: Any questions or issues are quickly resolved by experts deeply familiar with the Insider platform, your marketing goals, and challenges. All our support teams work in-house, so you don’t need third-party agencies or system integrators.
Benefit #4: Unified customer data and streamlined marketing operations
Building effective and personalized marketing strategies is only possible with a solid understanding of your customers’ journeys. That’s why Insider helps you bring together all relevant customer data from different sources into a single convenient database via our customer data platform (CDP).
Our CDP can unify data from any online or offline source — including customer relationship management systems (CRMs), content management systems (CMSs), APIs, analytics platfor
