Compare top web push notification platforms: OneSignal vs. PushCrew (VWO Engage) vs. Webpushr
We can understand that selecting a web push notifications API for your web app can be a daunting process. With so many choices out there, it can be difficult to choose the best platform that offers a good balance between features you need, your budget and your integration constraints. To make this selection easier for you, we conduct a detailed lab test of more than 20 different platform in our internal lab to shortlist and finally rank based on a pre-set list of criteria. We then publish our results on a monthly basis so people like you have a single reference that can help you make an informed decision. Below is a summary of our results. You can also read more detailed customer reviews to get additional insights.
If you are just starting out with push notifications, please try out our push demo inside the dial pad on this page to see how these notifications work. You can also try our additional HTML push notification demo to see more use cases.
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Feature comparison between OneSignal vs. PushCrew (VWO Engage) vs. Webpushr
Webpushr continues to offer and expand on it's best-in-class features & flexibility to integrate with 3rd party platforms such as WordPress, WooCommerce, Zapier, etc. It's ease of use makes it a great tool for marketers who are just starting out to use web push or for customers who are actively looking to switch to a better push platform. As outlined in the detailed comparison table above, it continues to be the only vendor to offer:
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Why is Webpushr better than OneSignal?
OneSignal has been around for more than 5 years. It is also therefore the current market leader. However, based on our extensive research and in-house lab tests, we believe that Webpushr is a significantly better option because:
- Unlike OneSignal (that has sold customer data in the past), Webpushr guarantees to never sell customer data to any 3rd party company (incl. advertising companies)
- Webpushr is the only push vendor to serve all images associated with push messages sent via third party integration (such as WordPress Plugin, REST API, etc.) through its own content delivery network (CDN). This results in significantly lower load and networking associated cost to publishers. We call this feature as "load shield" in our comparison table above.
- Webpushr is the only push vendor to provide highly detailed analytics on the full optin funnel. This includes showing you the push optin rate as a percentage of total prompt impressions as well as the total user sessions. The starting point for OneSignal, on the other hand, is your total push subscribers. OneSignal does not provide any visibility to how many users are either not able to (because the browser or OS does not support push technology) or actively dismiss to receive push notifications. OneSignal therefore leaves publishers in dark in terms of why, where and how many visitors are not opting in to receive push notifications.
- Unlike OneSignal, Webpushr's pricing model is strictly month-to-month. There are no pricing related surprises and annual contracts involved.
- Webpushr is 70% to 90% cheaper than Onesignal. See Webpushr's Pricing.
- Webpushr offers an intuitive and easy to use dashboard, as well as a better designed WordPress Plugin.
- Webpushr offers advanced features such as conversion tracking (to directly measure ROI) that is currently not offered by OneSignal.
- See a detailed comparison table between Webpushr & OneSignal in the table above.
 
Why we do NOT recommend OneSignal?
β οΈCAUTIONβ οΈ We have found serious privacy concerns with OneSignal as part of our extensive lab tests. OneSignal has previously actively sold customers' data. While it claims to not sell customers' data any longer, we noticed highly questionable & unauthorized data-collection code getting injected to all of our test sites after we integrated OneSignal. We find this to be absolutely unacceptable. See screenshot below: (dated August 27th, 2020)


The last screenshot above points to a JS file hosted on a seemingly benign domain, tynt.com, but it contains an extensive JS code that is owned by 33Across Inc. which is a data brokerage firm with a focus on Advertising and User Targeting.
Most publishers know of ShareThis.com to be a social widget company, but it also actively sells it's data to Advertisers and third-party data brokerage firms. Source
As part of our extensive tests, we are now able to conclude that OneSignal has an active data-selling partnership with various partners, including Sharethis, 33Across Inc. and possibly other data brokerage firms. We find this sneaky activity by OneSignal to be completely unacceptable and incredibly unfortunate. This also forces us to drop OneSignal from our list of recommended vendors.
OneSignal's enterprise plans also require an annual contract for discounted pricing. Other push vendors, such as Webpushr, do not lock you into any type of annual contracts while offering better pricing.
While it is free for small publishers, the cost of using OneSignal increases dramatically (from $0 to $100+) the moment you exceed 30K subscribers.
How customers reviewed OneSignal, PushCrew & Webpushr
You can see more detailed customer reviews below:
Why did we pick 50K subscribers as reference for cost comparison?
Based on our research, we believe that 50K represents the average subscriber count for most websites that use web push notifications today. Although OneSignal offers a free pricing tier, we decided to ignore it as most customers will surpass that limit in less than 12 months. We therefore recommend that you consider cost at 50K subscriber for any budgetary planning purposes
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