Head to head · Notify push · October 2026 research run

Courier vs Pushover

Courier has a score of 70.5 (BB) against Pushover's 53.3 (D). Both do notify push. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 66 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Courier	Pushover	Edge
Reliability	16%20	92	62	Courier +30
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	84	50	Courier +34
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	68	64	Courier +4
Security & auth	14%17.5	56	52	Courier +4
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	30	Courier +5
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	86	20	Courier +66
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	65	89	Pushover +24
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		70.5 · BB	53.3 · D

Fact	Courier	Pushover
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Courier	Pushover
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.courier.com`	`https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP
Auth	API key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Paid
x402	no	no
Licence	Apache-2.0 (Node SDK)	none
Tools exposed	170	none
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	no
MCP registry	`io.github.trycourier/courier`	not listed
Last release	2026-09-24	2026-06-23
Popularity	63 stars, 189k npm/wk, 35k PyPI/wk	none
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.

One POST with three required fields, form or JSON. Recipients need the app, $4.99 per platform after a 30-day trial.

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 priority 2 with retry (30 or more) and expire (10,800 or less) when a person must act, then poll the receipt
Don't retry a 4xx. Fix the parameter named in errors. Wait at least 5 seconds before retrying a 5xx
Read X-Limit-App-Remaining before a batch. Over the monthly quota every send returns 429
Keep messages to 1,024 characters and titles to 250
Send to a group key to reach several people in one call. Each person still counts against the quota