Head to head · Notify push · October 2026 research run

Courier vs OneSignal

Courier has a score of 70.5 (BB) against OneSignal's 69.6 (B). Both do notify push. The largest gap is reliability, 22 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Courier	OneSignal	Edge
Reliability	16%20	92	70	Courier +22
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	84	87	OneSignal +3
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	68	64	Courier +4
Security & auth	14%17.5	56	74	OneSignal +18
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	35	even
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	86	81	Courier +5
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	65	76	OneSignal +11
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		70.5 · BB	69.6 · B

Fact	Courier	OneSignal
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Courier	OneSignal
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.courier.com`	`https://api.onesignal.com`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	Apache-2.0 (Node SDK)	Modified MIT (Node SDK, use limited to OneSignal's services)
Tools exposed	170	43
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	yes	yes
MCP registry	`io.github.trycourier/courier`	not listed
Last release	2026-09-24	2026-09-30
Popularity	63 stars, 189k npm/wk, 35k PyPI/wk	52 stars, 231k npm/wk, 28k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	3/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

Free for 10,000 sends a month, then $0.005 a send with no platform fee. 170 MCP tools with no toolsets, filtering or read-only mode.

Runs push delivery itself, so there's no separate push provider to wire up. Three incidents on the API and SDK endpoints in September 2026.

Send an Idempotency-Key header on every send so a retry doesn't notify twice
Set routing.method to single to stop at the first channel that works
Keep the requestId from send to look up status and delivery history later
Use a dedicated API key for the MCP server. Every one of the 170 tools runs with that key's full rights
Space resends at least 2 seconds apart per message or you get a 429

Use Authorization: Key <key>, not Bearer, and put app_id in the body
Send an idempotency_key UUID with every create call and reuse it on each retry
On 429, wait for Retry-After, then back off with jitter, up to 10 attempts
Stay under 10 sends per subscribed subscription in 15 minutes or the app is disabled
Target people with include_aliases.external_id and set target_channel