Knock's features

Knock is product and customer messaging infrastructure. Engineering, product, and growth teams use one platform to send transactional messages, run lifecycle and marketing campaigns, and deliver in-product messaging. Developers integrate Knock through the API, SDKs, and CLI. Non-technical teammates manage content, targeting, sends, and measurement in the Knock dashboard.

For an introduction to the concepts behind these features, start with What is Knock?

What you need	Knock feature	Common owners
Event-driven transactional messages	Workflows	Engineering, product
Onboarding, engagement, and retention sequences	Workflows triggered by events or audience entry	Product, growth
One-time announcements, campaigns, and newsletters	Broadcasts	Marketing, growth
User segments	Audiences, static or dynamic	Growth, marketing, data
In-product banners, modals, paywalls, and announcements	Guides	Product, growth (UI by engineering)
In-app inbox and toasts	In-app feeds	Engineering
Outcome measurement	Goals with attribution	Growth, product
A/B tests	Experiment function	Growth, product
Engagement reporting	Analytics and warehouse export	Everyone

At the heart of Knock is the workflow engine. Workflows model cross-channel messaging logic while respecting each user's preferences:

• Cross-channel orchestration. Send to email, SMS, push, chat (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, WhatsApp), and in-app from one workflow. Use step conditions to sequence delivery, for example to send an email only if the recipient hasn't seen the in-app message.
• Function steps. Batch activity into digests, delay, throttle, branch on data, wait for an event, fetch external data, or run an agent function.
• Flexible triggers. Trigger workflows from the API and SDKs, from a source such as Segment, on a schedule, or when a user enters an audience.
• Bring your own providers. Send through the providers you already use, such as SendGrid, Postmark, Amazon SES, Twilio, APNs, and Firebase Cloud Messaging.
• Preferences. Give users a hosted or custom preference center. Knock enforces their preferences on every workflow run and broadcast.
• Multi-tenancy. Apply per-tenant branding, translations, and preferences for B2B products with tenants.

Workflows and broadcasts handle lifecycle and marketing messaging alongside transactional messaging, so every message shares the same templates, preferences, and recipient data.

• Lifecycle workflows. Build onboarding sequences, engagement campaigns, and retention flows. Start them when a user enters an audience, and use wait for event and branch steps to react to what users do.
• Broadcasts. Send one-time messages, such as product announcements, marketing campaigns, and newsletters, from the dashboard to an audience, to all users, or to users from a CSV upload. A broadcast can include several steps, for example an in-app message, a delay, and an email follow-up for users who didn't engage. Schedule a send for later, personalize by tenant, and run experiments inside the broadcast.
• Audiences. Sync static audiences from a reverse ETL tool such as Hightouch or Fivetran, or populate them from a CSV upload, the API, or the dashboard. Define dynamic audiences with query rules on user properties, and Knock updates their membership in real time. Workflows, broadcasts, and guides share the same audiences.
• Personalize templates. Edit messages in the drag-and-drop template editor with Liquid, partials, branding, and translations, and ship copy changes without a code change.
• Compliance. Commercial unsubscribe adds a one-click unsubscribe header and link to marketing email to support CAN-SPAM compliance.

• Guides. Power in-app banners, modals, paywalls, announcements, and onboarding flows with your own components and design system. Engineering builds the UI once, and content teams manage copy, targeting, and activation rules in the dashboard. Guides react to runtime data, so a guide appears only when it's relevant to what the user is doing.
• In-app feeds and toasts. Drop in pre-built feed and toast components with real-time delivery, accurate badge counts, and mark-as-read, or build your own UI with the SDKs and API.

• Analytics. The Analytics page shows message volume, delivery, and engagement across workflows, guides, and channels. Each workflow and broadcast has its own Analytics tab with per-step metrics, and each guide reports audience, seen, interacted, and archived counts.
• Goals with attribution. Define a business outcome, such as "Customer activated", that completes on an integration source event (from Segment, Stripe, or PostHog, for example) or when a user enters or leaves a dynamic audience. Attach the goal to a workflow, broadcast, or guide, and Knock credits each completion to the most recent message within an attribution window you set (1 to 30 days, 7 by default).
• Experiments. Add an experiment step to a workflow or broadcast to split recipients into percentage-based cohorts for A/B and holdout testing. Within a step, the same cohort key always lands in the same cohort, so recipients get consistent messaging across runs.
• Data streaming. Send message and engagement data to your data warehouse, CDP and analytics tools (Segment, Heap), observability tools (Datadog, New Relic), and outbound webhooks. See extensions for the full list.

Knock is designed with the needs of teams of all sizes in mind. Logically separated environments, branches, version control, and a full audit log help you introduce new messaging and manage existing messaging safely. Roles and permissions control who can edit and send, and Enterprise plans add SAML SSO and directory sync (SCIM).

Knock logs every message, including who received it, why, and how they engaged (opens, clicks, reads), for your account's data retention period.

Knock works with the AI tools your team already uses. The Knock agent builds and inspects messaging from the dashboard, and the Knock MCP server, CLI, and plugins for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Grok Bot connect Knock to your IDE and AI clients. See the Knock AI overview to choose between them.

Knock is built to keep your user and message data safe. Learn more about our security practices.