Knock vs CrewAI
Notifications-as-a-service: in-app feeds, email, push, SMS, chat via one API
vs. Role-playing multi-agent framework — agents that work together
Pricing tiers
Knock
Developer
Free forever. 10K messages, 500 guide users, 500 AI credits/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Starter
$250/mo. 50K messages, 2.5K guide users, 2K AI credits. Remove branding.
$250/mo
Enterprise
Custom pricing. White-label, i18n, data warehouse, Datadog, SCIM, SAML, HIPAA/BAA.
Custom
CrewAI
OSS (MIT)
MIT-licensed Python framework. Free forever.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Managed CrewAI Enterprise — deploy + monitor Crews in the cloud. Custom pricing.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing starter on Knock vs oss on CrewAI.
| Metric | Knock | CrewAI |
|---|---|---|
| guide users | 2500 users | — |
| guide users overage | $0.05/user USD/user | — |
| messages monthly | 50000 messages/mo | — |
| messages overage | $0.005/message USD/message | — |
Features
Knock · 13 features
- AI Agents — Autonomous notification drafting & workflow generation.
- Batch + Digest — Group notifications into digests on schedule or window.
- Chat — Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord.
- Email — Send via SendGrid/Postmark/Resend/Mailgun/AWS SES as relays.
- Guides — In-product messaging, announcements, modals, banners.
- i18n / Localization — Translate templates by user locale.
- In-App Feed — Notification inbox with React/Vue/iOS/Android drop-in components.
- Multi-tenancy — Per-tenant branding, preferences, quiet hours.
- Outbound Webhooks — Subscribe to delivery events.
- Preferences — User + tenant preference center with granular controls.
- Push — iOS (APNs), Android (FCM), Expo, Web Push.
- SMS — Twilio, MessageBird, Telnyx, Vonage as providers.
- Workflows — Visual notification orchestration (branch, batch, delay, throttle).
CrewAI · 11 features
- CrewAI Enterprise UI — Managed cloud for deploying + monitoring crews.
- Hierarchical Process — Manager agent delegates to workers.
- Human Input — human_input=True pauses for human review/approval.
- MCP Tool Support — Consume MCP servers as Agent tools.
- Memory — Short-term, long-term, entity memory per Crew/Agent.
- Observability Integrations — Langfuse, LangSmith, AgentOps, OpenLIT.
- Planning Feature — Optional planner agent that plans before task execution.
- Task Guardrails — Validate task output + retry with feedback.
- Testing — Test Crews deterministically with eval metrics.
- Tools — 70+ pre-built tools (search, scrape, file, vision, code exec).
- Training — Train agents from feedback loops.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Knock | CrewAI |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Knock CLI | CrewAI CLI |
| SDK | knockapi (Python), knockapi (Ruby), knock-elixir, knock-go, knock-java, @knocklabs/node, @knocklabs/react | crewai (Python) |
| REST | Knock REST API | CrewAI Enterprise |
| MCP | Knock MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Outbound Webhooks | — |
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