Guides

Power in-product messaging such as announcements, paywalls, and banners using your own components.

Overview

A guide represents a piece of UI that you want to be powered by Knock within your application.

You configure your guide in the Knock dashboard, including its content, its targeting rules (who can see it), and its activation rules (where in your product they can see it.)

You then use our API and client SDKs to render the data of a guide within your application.

Your engineering team owns the UI layer, and your content team owns the contents of the UI shown to users. Knock seamlessly powers this on your behalf, making it effortless to build powerful, managed UI components that anyone on your team can maintain.

Use cases

Upgrade flows. Show a guide to users on a free plan to display an upgrade button.
Outage banners. Show a guides to all customers when there's upcoming maintenance for your product.
In-place feature announcements. Ship static pieces of UI that prompt a user to learn more about new features.
Welcome modals. Display a welcome modal to new users to help them get started with your product.

Benefits

Using Knock guides to power your application UI gives you:

Native performance. Guides render as first-class React, Vue, or Angular components instead of injected scripts. They add no runtime overhead and stay aligned with your design system.
Composable primitives for engineers. The package ships components, hooks, low-level APIs, and socket infrastructure you can assemble into any in-product announcement, UI, or tour.
Self-service for product and marketing. Content, targeting, and activation rules are edited entirely in the dashboard; no code or deploys required.
Built-in analytics and observability. Delivery and engagement events are tracked automatically and can be forwarded to the analytics destinations you already use, whether that's a data warehouse, a third-party analytics service, or your own custom analytics platform.

Relevant documentation

Creating guides. Learn how to create a guide in the Knock dashboard.
Rendering guides. Learn how to render a guide in your application.

Frequently asked questions

We are using a monthly active users (MAU) pricing model for guides. If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to us at support@knock.app. We'll be announcing pricing details when we GA launch guides.

Not today. We're working on this and if you're interested we'd love to hear your use case at support@knock.app.

No, right now if your user enters an audience their guide eligibility will not be recalculated. Instead, you must either wait for the next guide fetch or manually trigger a refetch of the guides.

Yes, you can pass an arbitrary dictionary of data from your application to the guides API which can be used to determine eligibility as well as used in guide personalization.

Not as of our initial beta release. We're working on this and if you're interested we'd love to hear your use case at support@knock.app.