Concepts

Learn about the key concepts of Novu

Notification

A notification conveys information from source to recipient, triggered by a workflow acting as a message blueprint. Notifications can be individual or bundled as digest for user-friendliness.

Messages

A message in Novu represents a notification delivered to a recipient on a particular channel. Messages contain information about the request that triggered its delivery, a view of the data sent to the recipient, and a timeline of its lifecycle events. Learn more about messages.

Workflow

All notifications are sent via a workflow. Each workflow acts as a container for the logic and blueprint that are associated with a type of notification in your system. Learn more

Channel

A channel in Novu represents a configured provider, such as Sendgrid for email, to send notifications to your recipients. A channel is the communication-context domain with the recipients (subscribers).

Most providers within Novu use credentials that you supply to deliver notifications on your behalf. These credentials and other settings are what make a configured channel. Learn more

Subscriber

A subscriber in Novu represents someone who should receive a message. A subscriber’s profile information contains important attributes about the subscriber that will be used in messages (name, email). The subscriber object can contain other key-value pairs that can be used to further personalize your messages. Learn more about subscribers.

Topics

Topics are a way to group subscribers together so that they can be notified of events at once. A topic is identified by a custom key. This can be helpful for things like sending out marketing emails or notifying users of new features. Topics can also be used to send notifications to the subscribers who have been grouped together based on their interests, location, activities and much more. Learn more about topics.

Activity Feed

Novu provides a notification activity feed that monitors every outgoing message associated with its relevant metadata. This can be used to monitor activity and discover potential issues with a specific provider or a channel type. Learn more about the activity feed.

Integration Store

With the help of the integration store, you can easily integrate your favorite delivery provider. During the runtime of the API, the Integrations Store is responsible for storing the configurations of all the providers. Learn more

Providers

Providers are the channel service providers (Twilio, Sendgrid, APN, etc,) you connect to Novu so that it can send your notifications. Rather than replacing your existing providers, Novu passes your notifications to the providers you already use via these channel integrations. Learn more about providers.

Environment

• Production
• Development

Novu uses the concept of environments to ensure logical separation of your data and configuration. This means that subscribers, and preferences created in one environment are never accessible to another. Learn more about environments.

Handlebars & Helpers

Handlebars is a simple templating language that generates HTML.

Novu-specific Helpers make it possible to define custom iterators and other functionality that can invoke the passed block with a new context. Learn more about helpers.

Organization

An organization serves as a separate entity within your Novu account. Each organization you create has its own separate integration store, workflows, subscribers, and API keys. This separation of resources allows you to manage multi-tenant environments and separate domains within a single account.

Switching your organization in the UI only affects the UI and does not deactivate any organizations on the API side. Moreover, the message delivery for each organization operates simultaneously.

Keep in mind that workflows and integration stores for one organization cannot be used for subscribers of other organizations.

To create a new organization, you interact with a drop down menu in the bottom of the left navigation bar within Novu’s application. Type the name of your new organization, and if the name is new, you will see a button that enables you to add a new one.

To switch between organizations, you again interact with the same drop down menu and switch between the organizations you have in your Novu account.

Notification Center

Notification Center is a beautifully designed and highly functional in-app experience for your users that you can add to your product quickly and effortlessly.

The core components of our Notification Center are:

• A list of notifications with real-time updates
• Notification preference management
• State management and actions for notifications (mark as read/unread, and delete)
• And more

Learn more

Preference

A preference indicates a user’s willingness to receive a particular type of notification. Preferences always belong to a user and can be paired with an identifier that represents the account or tenant that the user belongs to (for multi-tenant applications). Learn more

Delay Actions

The delay action awaits a specified amount of time before moving on to trigger the following steps of the workflow. Learn more

Digest

The digest engine collects multiple trigger events, aggregates them into a single message and delivers it to the subscriber. Learn more

Layouts

Novu allows the creation of layouts - a specific HTML design or structure to wrap content of email notifications. Layouts can be manipulated and assigned to new or existing workflows within the Novu platform, allowing users to create, manage, and assign these layouts to workflows, so they can be reused to structure the appearance of notifications sent through the platform. Learn more

Tenants

A tenant represents a group of users. As a developer, when your apps have organizations, they are referred to as tenants. Tenants in Novu provides the ability to tailor specific notification experiences to users of different groups or organizations. Learn more about Novu Tenants.