What is Novu and How Does It Work

Novu is a developer-first product built for engineers looking to deliver a notifications platform for products.

You can integrate it into your app to

• Send email
• Inbox alerts
• SMS
• Push notifications
• and Chat

Novu simplifies the complexities of notification management for developers who can then empower the product and marketing teams that need to edit and maintain notification content and copy.

As a developer, you no longer have to develop notification from scratch. Novu handles it for you so that you can focus on building you applications other features.

How Novu Works

Novu is all about plug and play.

Here is an image of how Novu works. On your application, you can use the Novu API to send email and chat.

There are also numerous applications of how Novu works in different apps and scenarios. You can check some like this one on how to use it in an e-commerce store.

Notification Center

Novu supports multiple frontend frameworks for their existing notification center component that they provide you out of the box.

You don't have to recreate the functionality. You can just plug and play and use it as it is with a fully functional notification center for you.

Also, you get support for the programming language of your choice. Be it PHP, Python, Go, Ruby, or Kotlin.

Open Source

Novu is open source, meaning you can see how the product is built and even contribute to it.

They are very transparent in what they do and even welcome open source developers to contribute to it.

If you would like to check Novu on GitHub, here is the link to their repository.

What Novu integrates to

There are numerous ways that you can use Novu like In-app, email, chat and more.

The one that caught my eye is the sms. You can basically send with a few lines of code.

Here is an example code for node.js.

import { Novu } from '@novu/node';

const novu = new Novu('<NOVU_API_KEY>');

novu.trigger('<WORKFLOW_TRIGGER_IDENTIFIER>', {
to: {
subscriberId: '<SUBSCRIBER_ID>',
},
overrides: {
sms: {
integrationIdentifier: "infobip-abcdef"
},
},
});

Playground

What I liked most about Novu is that, after you create your account, you are presented with a playground.

Here, you are able to play with Novu as you would when developing it.

You are able to see how each functionality works.

It is like a video game tutorial. How you would play the game.

No code for product teams

Product teams, that is the marketing guys can manipulate the code without the input of engineers.

If for example they don't want a certain field in the application, they are able to remove it effortlessly.

Community

For the icing of the cake, there is a community on Discord for Novuians. You can join and ask questions anytime. It is also a very interactive community where as a young developer, I received great merch and interracted with very welcoming developers who shared their experience and knowledge.

Conclusion

With Novu basically, the days of building notifications as developers are over. One less headache.

This allows you to ship faster since you can just plug in notifications into your app in minutes.

Happy coding!
Karl