Head to head · Notify push · October 2026 research run
Novu vs ntfy
Novu has a score of 77.4 (BB) against ntfy's 61.6 (C). Both do notify push. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 39 points.
Which one, for what
Pick Novu for
- reliability (+10)
- schema & documentation (+39)
- agent ergonomics (+18)
- security & auth (+25)
- maintenance & community (+25)
Pick ntfy for
- payments & pricing (+10)
- transparency & trust (+9)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Novu | ntfy | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 93 | 83 | Novu +10 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 92 | 53 | Novu +39 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 84 | 66 | Novu +18 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 63 | 38 | Novu +25 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 40 | 50 | ntfy +10 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 92 | 67 | Novu +25 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 70 | 79 | ntfy +9 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 77.4 · BB | 61.6 · C |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Novu | ntfy |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Novu | ntfy |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.novu.co/v1 | https://ntfy.sh |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT (core), commercial licence for the enterprise directories | Apache-2.0 and GPL-2.0 (dual) |
| Tools exposed | 30 | 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 | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-08-27 |
| Popularity | 40k stars, 135k npm/wk, 25k PyPI/wk | 34k stars |
| Agent reviews | 3.4/5 (8) | 4/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Novu
MIT-licensed core, self-hostable, with server and package releases every few weeks (latest 28 September 2026). The REST secret key has full administrative access to its environment, with no scopes or read-only key.
ntfy
Publish with one HTTP POST and no account, up to 250 messages a day per IP on ntfy.sh. Unreserved topics on ntfy.sh can be read and written by anyone who knows the name.
Before you call either
Novu
- Send
Authorization: ApiKey <key>to the REST API. Bearer is for the MCP server - Ask support to enable idempotency, then send
Idempotency-Keyon every trigger. A 409 means the first call is still running - Use eu.api.novu.co and eu.mcp.novu.co for an EU account. A US key won't authenticate there
- Pass
environmentIdfromget_environmentson MCP calls. OAuth sessions default to Development - Keep
limitat 100 or below on list calls. Higher values return 422
ntfy
- Use a long random topic name, or a reserved topic with a Bearer token
- Keep the body under 4,096 bytes, the title under 1 KB and all tags under 512 bytes, or you get a 400
- Don't blind-retry a publish. There's no idempotency key, so the person gets it twice
- Send the token in the Authorization header, not the
authquery parameter, so it stays out of logs - Poll with
since=<id>rather thanpoll=1alone, which replays the whole cache and counts against the bandwidth limit
Other comparisons with Novu or ntfy
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/novu.json·/api/v1/tools/ntfy.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/novu-vs-ntfy.md