OneSignal Web Push Review: Is It Worth Your Try?

Have you come across websites that request you to send you notifications for various events on their website?

If yes, that’s the signal of web push notifications!

Push notifications are one of the newborn opt-in services delivered directly to the user if they are on your website or drinking a cup of coffee in front of the TV.

You can get those for your website too. Your viewers will receive a notification every time you publish something; then, chances are they can turn into loyal subscribers. This option is actually more preferred than build an email list, as your audience may be skeptical about providing their email addresses in the threat of receiving spam.

With the help of OneSignal, you can do this! The platform has proved to be one of the best push notification services for every blog/ website.

Follow our review to explore more!

What is OneSignal?

OneSignal is a popular customer messaging and engagement solution, which offers mobile and web push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, and email. The platform enables one million businesses to deliver more than 8 billion messages daily.

OneSignal takes just a few minutes to set up, and makes it easy for you to send push notifications and messages to your audience. Plus, the software offers access to robust features, including segmentation, intelligent delivery, automated messaging, A/B testing, and real-time reports.

Designed for developers, OneSignal makes it simple to code in the language you know with any development environment - all with less than 10 lines of code. It is also the most flexible push notification provider, with integrations to top analytics providers, DMPs, and CRMs, as well as Zapier to connect with 1,400+ apps and platforms.

Related topic: Web Push Notification: Everything You Need to Know

Main messaging channels of OneSignal

Mobile Push

When you pick your mobile phone, the first messages you often see are push notifications - maybe there is a breaking news alert, game update, mentions from a social channel, etc.

Mobile push by OneSignal offers triggered automated messages based on user behavior - for instance, set a follow-up message for 24 hours after they download the app. Or, you can select its unique feature called Intelligent Delivery, which optimizes notification delivery time based on when each user most frequently accessed your website or app.

Web Push

The customizable Notify Bell makes it easy for your subscribers to opt-in to notifications on your website and control their settings. You can choose between auto-prompting, the Notify Button, or your own custom settings UI.

Plus, with OneSignal, you’re able to control when a subscriber sees push permission prompts based on the number of page views or seconds spent on a page (or both). Delayed push permission prompts help to improve opt-in rates for notifications and ensure your messages reach your audience.

In-app

With OneSignal, you can onboard, nurture, and retain users with highly customizable in-app messages delivered whenever your customers need them.

You can leverage its powerful targeting to customize messages to defined segments or trigger messages based on user behavior. In addition, it’s easy to drag-and-drop blocks of text, images, gifs, and buttons, and get up and running in a matter of minutes, all with no code.

In-app messages immediately show up in your app. Built-in analytics help you optimize for engagement. You can do everything without the need to submit changes to iOS or Android app stores.

Email

With OneSignal’s Email Composer, your messages will look great on every device. The platform offers free templates and allows you to customize them to match your unique brand. They have an intuitive drag-and-drop composer, so there is no need to code.

You can maximize conversion by ensuring that your emails are relevant and timely. OneSignal’s Segmentation Editor makes it straightforward to target exactly the right audience with personalized content, based on their geographic location, interests, and purchase activity.

SMS

SMS is a robust re-engagement channel and has the highest open and engagement rates of all messaging channels.

OneSignal helps communicate with your customers in a mobile-first way even when you don’t have an app, when your audiences haven’t downloaded your app, and when your customers don’t have a mobile phone. You can set up smart campaigns with its powerful segmentation to make sure your campaigns reach the right people with the right message.

Furthermore, it’s simple to add emojis, images, video, and audio to make your messages visually compelling, all with no code. Or automate customized messages at scale with the API. Send SMS to your audience on a global scale, with delivery powered by Twilio.

Key features of OneSignal

OneSignal is actually an excellent product, and the main features to highlight its position to be amongst league leaders are:

Real-time analysis

It’s pretty easy to fetch the report from OneSignal about your engagement, conversion, and the increase of subscriber demography. It can track down the effect of your subscriber from every message delivered with the proper report. It’s really easy to understand the picture of what impact the messages are having on your subscriber.

Scalability

If you’re dealing with a large crowd worldwide, it isn’t an issue. OneSignal covers every possible geographical area to deal with your business. It’s got a wide coverage area and can send email/ text/ web all over in a single click.

Cross platform

OneSignal can deliver to both web and native platforms, while sending notifications to voice apps such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.

In addition, the platform now supports sending email notifications.

A/B testing

With OneSignal, you can see what push notification can re-engage most users before you send it to everyone. The platform allows you to experiment to see what resonates with your users.

For example, consider changing up your tone: do your audiences prefer concise facts or cheeky, open-ended questions? Or, you can take it a step further by trying new emojis, images, icons, sounds, and badges.

With the A/B testing feature, you’re able to get a possible idea of the kind of notifications that have a huge impact on your subscribers.

Related post: A Complete Guide to A/B Testing

Detailed analytics

Most other platforms provide only the “sent count” and “open count,” and maybe a bar chart. OneSignal, on the other hand, provides better analytics with delivered, failed, unsubscribes, click-through rate, and more.

Segmentation

If you’ve got a particular kind of audience in a specific area, OneSignal lets you segment the text message and provide a particular content for that area only. OneSignal offers an advanced segmentation of your notification based on your location, event, device information, and so on. Hence, you can focus on a particular audience to deliver highly relevant messages.

Automated notifications

In case you have daily or weekly events, this feature can help you set out a notification whenever the event is triggered. The platform automatically pushes the notification to your subscribers and lets them know about your event. So, you don’t need to send notifications manually.

Scheduled notification

If you want your subscribers to get a particular message at a certain time period, this feature is for you. You can schedule notifications based on a user’s time zone, or even based on the same time of day they last visited your website.

Open source

Its SDKs are open source, and every component is accessible via API. This feature can help developers work for further advancement.

Ease of use of OneSignal web push

It’s an essential point to note, especially when you first access a platform. The less time it takes, the easier it becomes to work upon; thus you can rely upon it pretty easily.

As a matter of fact, it’s quite straightforward to have OneSignal run. It takes about 15 minutes to set up, and it’s ON! You can either use your own Google, Facebook, or GitHub account to sign up, or create a new account. Then, you will receive a confirmation email at your registered email ID. Remember to confirm it, and you’re good to go.

For more information you can read how to run OneSignal web push on WordPress.

Customer support of OneSignal web push

You can email OneSignal at support+sales@onesignal.com or send them a chat to discuss. The platform also lets you submit a form, including your information details, to contact them.

Their support team is quite friendly and willing to help. As usual, the higher the pricing plan you go with, the better and faster support you’ll get.

Pricing plans of OneSignal

OneSignal offers 4 pricing plans, including:

Free Plan: $0/ month, you’ll get free access to:

• Limited personalization
• Unlimited API sends
• Intelligent delivery
• A/B testing
• GDPR compliant
• Web push is limited to 10,000 recipients per message

Growth Plan: from $9/ month, including all features of the Free Plan, plus:

• Standard personalization
• Advanced in-app messaging
• List uploads
• Confirmed delivery
• GDPR compliant + DPA

Professional Plan: from $99/ month, including all features of the Growth Plan, plus:

• Advanced personalization
• CSV exports
• Advanced analytics
• Custom event tracking
• 24/7 prioritize email

Enterprise Plan: custom pricing, including all features of the Enterprise Plan, plus:

• Custom segments & tags
• Custom contract, SLA & DPA
• Onboarding & 24/7 support
• Admin controlled 2FA
• Advanced user permissions

Pros and cons of using OneSignal

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Highly customizable
• Useful features
• Integrates well with many apps
• Scalable pricing plans with a free plan

Cons:

• A bit of technical knowledge is required
• In some cases of migrating to a new domain name or app, you can’t carry your subscribers along
• Not many notification providers

Alternatives to OneSignal

Webpushr

Webpushr is a great alternative to OneSignal. It’s a high-volume and easy-to-use web push notification service for websites that is supported by all devices.

We love its intuitive online dashboard, which makes it ideal for beginners or marketers that don’t want too many unwanted bells & whistles. The platform offers plenty of features, such as user segmentation, automated messaging, and pre-scheduled push at much lower pricing compared to OneSignal. Speaking of pricing, we love that it offers most features at any pricing plan - something we haven’t encountered with other products.

Webpushr is committed to company/ subscriber privacy and doesn’t sell subscriber endpoint information to advertisers. The reason we bring this up is because some other companies have compromised on privacy by actively selling customer information to fund their operating expenses.

Webpushr’s pricing plans:

• Free Plan
• Individual Plan: $29/ month
• Startup Plan: $49/ month
• Growth Plan: $99/ month
• Enterprise Plan: custom pricing

VWO Engage

VWO Engage, also called PushCrew, is also a good alternative to OneSignal, although it’s more costly to use on a per-subscriber cost basis. It provides most of the features that are currently provided by OneSignal.

Although its web dashboard is not as easy-to-use as Webpushr’s, we like its ability to perform advanced user analytics and run our custom reports. Another great benefit of VWO Engage is that it offers a 30-day free trial for all its premium plans.

VWO Engage’s pricing plans:

• Growth plan: from $99/ month
• Pro Plan: custom pricing
• Enterprise Plan: custom pricing

iZooto

Last but not least, iZooto is an alternative solution to OneSignal that leverages web push notifications for companies to drive additional traffic and conversions.

The software offers a straightforward web-based console to view reports and manage web push campaigns. iZooto can greatly aid you in building, engaging, and retaining your visitors with targeted and contextual web push notifications.

iZooto’s pricing plans:

• Rise Plan: $85/ month
• Grow Plan: $250/ month
• Enterprise Plan: custom pricing

Is OneSignal web push your right choice?

OneSignal is incredibly useful with a front-facing user interface that even non-devs can easily use. Apart from that, it has many other righteous features that can help you a lot with your web push campaigns.

As it offers a free plan, we think it’s worth a nice try. If you find it suitable, you can commit to higher pricing plans.

We hope this review has helped you a lot! Enjoy it and give us feedback if you have any! Thanks for reading!