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Customization

There’s a lot to choose from in terms of customization. You can choose between 6 different types of call-to-action buttons. If you like, you can add emojis, different image options, and local languages as well. You can even set delivery and expiry times for each notification.

That said, how do you know what works and what doesn’t? The simplest way to customize your notifications the way your subscribers love them is to check funnel analytics. This way, you can find opt-in funnels with the highest subscription rate and double down on them.

• Send notifications that your subscribers can’t ignore
• Increase your subscribers using multiple opt-in types
• Customize each notification to any extent you like
• Leverage the PushEngage Javascript API for powerful personalization

Customizing your push notifications is the only way to keep offering a great user experience and still get killer sales. So, what can you customize for your notifications?

Let’s look at OneSignal first.

You can send messages in any language you like and use any notification image you want:

You can also customize the appearance according to the browser. There are limitations, but we’ll talk about that a little later:

You can even set an expiry date and time for each notification:

If you like, you can add custom call-to-action buttons for your push notifications:

Last, but not least, you can select a delivery schedule:

Now, this last one may need a little bit of exploration, so let’s dive deeper into it. You basically have 3 options to send out push notifications:

• Send your notification to everyone at the same time
• Send the notification over a 24-hour time period based on when the subscriber is most likely to open the notification
• Send it to everyone at a fixed time in their respective timezones

That’s actually a decent amount of customization and each feature can be used to create personalized notifications with a high open rate. You can A/B test your notifications as well, but we’ll talk more about it when we go over data analytics.

Now, let’s take a look at what PushEngage has to offer.

The first thing you see is the notification message customizer and it’s deceptively simple:

As you can clearly see, you can use a custom notification icon. But what you probably don’t see immediately is the fact that you can use any language and emoji to create custom messages. You can even see the character limit in the input fields so that you can easily create messages that can be seen clearly on any device.

You can add multiple call-to-action buttons as well. But unlike OneSignal, you can actually use custom images for the CTAs!

You even get a prompt to help you upload your large notifciation image with the right dimensions:

As with OneSignal, you can add an expiry date for your push notifications:

But here’s the really cool part – you get an extra feature here. You can actually keep your notifications open until your subscribers interact with them. You can’t add this customization with OneSignal. How cool is that!

If you’re running a bunch of marketing campaigns, then you already know how important UTM parameters can be. With PushEngage, you can add UTM parameters directly to your notifications from the dashboard!

OneSignal doesn’t really have that feature and if you want to add UTM parameters to track your campaigns, you’ll have to set it up separately. This can be a real pain if you’re used to Google Analytics and you need your push notifications data to show up clearly in your analytics tool.

Last but not the least is delivery scheduling:

Of course, it’s really easy to see from the image that PushEngage offers everything that OneSignal does. At least, that’s what it looks like on the surface. In reality, PushEngage uses TurboSending to send out bulk notifications to a huge subscriber list almost simulatenously. This is areally handy feature for holiday season promos where time is of the essence.

And yes, you can send out notifications in the subscriber’s time zone as well. The only downside is that you don’t get historical data here. So, you can’t send it at times when the subscriber is most likely to open. If that’s super-important to you, then OneSignal is a better choice.

But one extra custom feature that you probably missed from the screenshot is the Repeat Schedule feature:

This feature is super-helpful for online class reminders, webinars, and pretty much any live event. You could even use it to remind your subscribers that they bought a ticket to a concert or a movie for date night! It’s also great for eCommerce websites with weekend sales.

Customization	PushEngage	OneSignal
Custom Large Image and Icons	✓	✓
Multi-CTA Options	✓	✓
Custom Opt-In Types	✓	✓
Emojis and Local Languages	✓	✓
Custom Campaign Scheduling	✓	✓

Engagement Campaigns

You can create campaigns based on any user action. The action could be a click, a download, video watch times, purchases, or any other action. Customize your notifications with data tags for higher clicks. Feel free to create multiple notifications, each with different personalized messages and show up exactly when your subscribers need you the most.

• 4x your open rates
• Turn notifications into conversations
• Create innovative campaigns that your audience will love
• Leverage pre-built campaigns to improve sales

Every conversion funnel is based on three steps: Attract » Engage » Convert

So, before you can sell your products effectively, you need your subscribers to be engaged enough with your brand to care about your products. Now, most people imagine that engagement campaigns must be some incredibly complex and artsy campaigns. In reality, all you need to do is create personalized messages that keep pushing your subscribers to keep interacting with your website.

It’s really just that simple!

Let’s check out what OneSignal can offer now.

• Cart Abandonment Campaigns
• Drip Autoresponder Campaigns
• Blog Post Notification Campaigns
• Price Drop/ Inventory Alert Notifications

Now, before we talk about these campaigns, we need you to know that PushEngage offers the exact same campaigns and a few more:

• Cart Abandonment Campaigns
• Drip Autoresponder Campaigns
• Blog Post Notification Campaigns
• Price Drop/ Inventory Alert Notifications
• Browse Abandonment Campaigns

The only difference is that with OneSignal, you’ll have to use their API to create Cart Abandonment campaigns. We’ve already talked about Drip Autoresponders in the Automation section of this comparison. So, we won’t go over that again. But the automated blog post push notifications are where it starts to get complicated.

Let’s break all of this down step by step.

As we said, you’ll have to use the OneSignal API and documentation to create Cart Abandonment campaigns. There’s no simple way to do it.

With PushEngage, however, you can set up Cart Abandonment campaigns pretty much straight from the dahsboard:

As with any push notifications campaign, you can customize every notification as per your convenience:

See the shortcodes in curly braces like {{productname}}? Those are data tags that you can configure in any way you like using the PushEngage API. It’s not necessary because the most important eCommerce tags are already defined for you, but you still have the option to customize everything.

The best part? This is all set up and pre-configured for you.

Once you’re done tweaking the message and other elements of the message, you click on the Your Code button:

This will automatically generate the Javascript pixel for your campaign. Depending on the specifics of the campaign, you’ll need to insert that code into your website. Of course, you can customize it further using the PushEngage API. If you’re stuck anywhere, our Customer Success team will help you out instantly.

As we said, this process is still fairly simple compared to sending out new blog post notifications. You’ll need to use Zapier and OneSignal to get it done.

That’s the reason why OneSignal offers so many integrations. You’ll have to manually set this up.

With PushEngage, you don’t even have to do anything at all! By default, PushEngage sends out a notification to all your subscribers every time you publish a new article!

Of course, you can disable this feature in the WordPress dashboard and send out custom notifications to specific segments if you want:

But that’s a simple matter to creating a new notification from the PushEngage dashboard.

This brings us to a standout feature in PushEngage – Browse Abandonment campaigns.

Browse Abandonment campaigns work just like Cart Abandonment campaigns. The only difference is that your visitors don’t need to actually add anything to the cart. You can target web visitors who were browsing your products and content and bring them back to the website!

This is essentially a precursor to the Cart Abandonment campaign and the goal is to get the visitor to add something to their cart. For a media website, it could be used to simply read the full article and opt in to the lead magnet.

All you have to do is go to the PushEngage dashboard and set up a Browse Abandonment campaign in the exact same way as the CartAbandonment Campaign:

To get the same thing done on OneSignal, you’ll have to create a custom Drip Campaign template using their API.

As usual, you can customize the code in any way you want. But you can still use the basic code straight out of the box.

A somewhat similar campaign is the Price Drop/Inventory Alert campaign. These campaigns are meant to bring back visitors who were keen on buying, but the product was either out of stock or too expensive. It’s a very simple way to re-engage your subscribers and nudge them to buy something without being intrusive and annoying.

Very cool!

The best part? You can do this straight from the PushEngage dashboard:

As with other automated campaigns, you can customize each notification and add the code to your website:

Again, this is pretty difficult with OneSignal. They have documented ways to create an inventory alert for Shopify. But it’s fair to say that you’ll most definitely need a developer to create these custom notifications.

As you can see, it’s pretty hard to create powerful re-engagement campaigns with OneSignal. It becomes even harder because each plan only has a limited number of data tags that you can use. This is where PushEngage dominates because it’s so simple to use.

Engagement Campaigns	PushEngage	OneSignal
Cart Abandonment Campaigns	✓	✓
Browse Abandonment Campaigns	✓	✕
Price Drop/Inventory Alert Campaigns	✓	Supported, but difficult to use
New Blog Post Notifications	✓	Supported, but difficult to use
Drip Autoresponder Campaigns	✓	✓

Analytics and A/B Testing

Analytics and A/B testing sound way more complex than they actually are. With the right tools, you can check your web push notification subscription rates by day/week/month.

You can even check the performance of individual notifications and see which ones have the highest Click Rate. Crush your competitors by analyzing your performance data based on time, date, and content. As an added perk, you can keep an eye on your entire audience from a single, super-intuitive dashboard.

• Optimize user engagement
• Run tests on controlled segments
• Get actionable insights on audience preferences
• Measure actual outcomes for your campaigns
• Get delivery confirmation reports

We’re clubbing Analytics and A/B testing together because they’re pretty closely related. Of course, they’re separate features but A/B testing is pretty useless if you can’t analyze the test, isn’t it?

So, let’s dive straight into the features and we’ll start with OneSignal.

With OneSignal, you get advanced analytics with direct, indirect, and unattributed user actions. You also get notification delivery confirmation and a robust Analytics API for advanced user-level analytics.

You get the exact same things for PushEngage:

As an added perk, you get detailed analytics for the entire funnel as well.

Since OneSignal is an omnichannel tool, you can get funnel analytics on a broader scale across all campaigns.

In simpler words: PushEngage gives you dedicated analytics for your push notifications whereas OneSignal gives you the combined data for email, web push, and SMS campaigns.

Of course, both PushEngage and OneSignal offer A/B testing and the analytics you get for both tools extends to A/B tests as well.

This is what an A/B test campaign setup looks like for OneSignal:

This is what an A/B test campaign setup looks like for PushEngage:

Of course, you can customize the notifications like any other notification for both platforms. The only difference here is that PushEngage has Intelligent A/B testing in its latest update.

Intelligent A/B tests send out the test campaign to a small percentage of your subscriber segments and based on the results, it sends out the better version to everyone else. For instance, if you choose to A/B test for 10% of your subscribers, the remaining 90% will get the better version as found by the A/B test:

This means that you’ll spend way less on sending out notifications and you’ll make way more sales than a conventional A/B test. In a conventional A/B test, you send each version to 50% of the audience. Of course, this will tell you a lot for future campaigns, but you leave a lot of money on the table from the current campaign.

Intelligent A/B testing is one of PushEngage’s biggest advantages over OneSignal.

Analytics and A/B Testing	PushEngage	OneSignal
User Analytics	✓	✓
Push Funnel Analytics	✓	✕
Push Notifications A/B Testing	✓	✓
Intelligent A/B Testing	✓	✕

The Bottom Line: OneSignal vs PushEngage

We’ll be very frank and upfront with you.

OneSignal has more features. In some instances, it even has better features. But honestly, we still recommend PushEngage for 3 reasons:

1. We’re specialists: You probably get the gist of this by now, but we don’t create a bunch of tools. Push notifications are our bread and butter and we love creating a powerful, laser-focused tool.
2. We provide consultations: Our Customer Success team really is the best. We don’t just help you with installation and dashboard issues, we help you deploy campaigns of all types.
3. We’re actually affordable: Yes, OneSignal gives you 10,000 free subscribers. But after that, your costs are going to go through the roof. This is not an exaggeration. Many of our customers were once OneSignal users. They chose us later on because of OneSignal’s pricing.

So, if you’re looking for a platform that gives you a bunch of tools and integrations, OneSignal is clearly the better choice. If you need push notifications that can help you grow your online audience without bankrupting your company, then PushEngage is the right fit for you.

Complete Comparison Breakdown	PushEngage	OneSignal
Action-Based Segmentation	✓	✕
Date Based Segmentation	✓	✕
Device/Browser-Based Segmentation	✓	✓
Geo Based Segmentation	✓	✓
Trigger Based Segmentation	✓	✕
Dynamic Segmentation	✓	✕
Drip Autoresponders	✓	✓
Browse Abandonment Campaigns	✓	✕
Price Drop/Inventory Alert Campaigns	✓	Supported, but difficult to use
Cart Abandonment Campaigns	✓	✕
New Blog Post Notifications	✓	Supported, but difficult to use
Welcome Notifications	✓	✓
Re-engagement Campaigns	✓	✓
Price Drop/Inventory Alert Campaigns	✓	✕
RSS Auto Push	✓	✕
Multi-Domain Accounts	✓	✓
Multi-User Accounts	✓	✓
Multi-Platform Support	Supports 18 platforms	Supports 30+ platforms
Multi-Browser Support	Supports 8 browsers	Supports 9 browsers
Data Portability	✓	✕
Custom Large Image and Icons	✓	✓
Multi-CTA Options	✓	✓
Custom Opt-In Types	✓	✓
Emojis and Local Languages	✓	✓
Custom Campaign Scheduling	✓	✓
User Analytics	✓	✓
Push Funnel Analytics	✓	✕
Push Notifications A/B Testing	✓	✓
Intelligent A/B Testing	✓	✕

PushEngage can help you grow your business on autopilot:

• Even if… you’ve never used push notifications before and you don’t know where to begin;
• Even if… you’ve used push notifications from another vendor and you’ve failed to make it work;
• Even if… you grew a subscriber list with another vendor before it got too expensive for you;

Your level of expertise doesn’t make a difference; our committment to helping you grow your business sustainably, will.

Which one are you going to choose? Do you have any questions? Awesome! Hit us up on live chat and we’d be happy to address any queries you may have.