Product notifications, plus a channel layer for AI agents
Novu is notification infrastructure for people building applications. The app triggers a workflow through the API; Novu runs the steps (in-app, email, SMS, push, chat) and hands each one to the provider configured for that channel. Novu also sells a hosted version, Novu Cloud. The README calls the project "the open-source communication infrastructure for agents and products": the same layer connects an AI agent you have already built to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp or email, and leaves the agent logic to whoever wrote it.
A real-time inbox, digests and read-aware step conditions
- Embeddable inbox: a real-time
<Inbox />component for React, with Next.js and plain JavaScript packages, plus a preferences component where each user picks their channels. - Action steps: delay, digest (several events folded into one message), throttle (a cap on how often a workflow runs within a time window) and HTTP request.
- Conditions on earlier steps: a step can check whether an in-app notification was seen or read. The docs describe the usual pattern: in-app message, a 24-hour delay, then an email only if the message is still unread.
- Swappable providers: the README lists 20 for email (Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP...), 37 for SMS, 8 for push (FCM, APNS, Expo...) and 13 for chat (Slack, Discord, Mattermost...).
- Workflows as code: Novu Framework keeps workflows in TypeScript inside the application's own repository. Novu fetches content from a "Bridge Endpoint" the application exposes.
A single seat in the community edition, MongoDB and Redis to run
The free self-hosted edition allows a single team member. Novu's Community Self-Hosted vs Novu Cloud matrix sets that limit and leaves out SAML or OIDC SSO, MFA, role-based access control, email delivery and engagement tracking, removal of Novu branding, and any environment beyond the second. The same page frames the community edition as the way to test and experiment and Novu Cloud as the "easy button"; teams that want to self-host without those limits are pointed to an Enterprise Edition, through sales.
The repository is open core. Everything is MIT except the enterprise/ directory (ai, api, auth, billing, translation and other modules), which falls under a proprietary Novu license. That license allows internal use only, forbids modification and requires prior written approval from Novu, to be requested at an address the text still leaves as "[contact information]".
An instance needs MongoDB, Redis and object storage. The community docker-compose.yml in the repository starts six containers: MongoDB 8.0, Redis, the API, the worker, the WebSocket server and the dashboard, on 3.19.0 images. For a single machine, the self-hosting overview budgets 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM for the Novu services, 2 GB for MongoDB, 2 GB for Redis with AOF persistence, and 10 GB of S3, GCS or Azure Blob storage.
Novu measures itself against Knock, Courier, MagicBell, SuprSend and building in-house. Its Knock page sets an open-source, self-hostable platform against a proprietary hosted one, and pricing per workflow run against pricing per message sent.
The latest server release is v3.19.0, from August 7, 2026. Seven minor versions shipped in 2026, starting with v3.12.0 on January 8, and none since August 7, while the default branch, next, has taken more than 200 commits since October 1. The SDKs ship separately: @novu/framework 2.14.0 came out on September 28. Much of what v3.19.0 added concerns agents and messaging channels (WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, web chat).