Notifications

In Novu, notifications are the core building blocks of your product’s communication experience. When your user receives a message via an in-app alert, an email, or a push notification, they’re seeing the final output of a notification.

Notifications represent the complete journey of a message triggered by an event in your application and delivered to a specific user across one or more channels. They encapsulate all the execution logic and delivery metadata in a single traceable unit.

Notification lifecycle

A notification doesn't exist in isolation, it’s the result of a sequence of interconnected entities working together. Here’s how it works in Novu:

Event

The notification lifecycle starts with an event, this event represents something meaningful that has happened in your application, such as a new comment, user sign-up, or password reset request.

These events are how your application communicates to Novu that it is time to send a particular notification to certain subscribers.

Each event in Novu contains:

• A name that maps to a specific workflow (user_signed_up)
• A payload with dynamic data
• One or more subscribers
• Optional overrides or metadata

Workflow

This event that was triggered in your application, in turn triggers the workflow(s) attached to it. This workflow determines the delivery channels to be used to send the notification to the user and also the format in which the notification content will be displayed in the various channels.

Notification

Once the workflow begins, Novu creates a notification for each subscriber included in the event.

Think of it as the container for all activity triggered by a single event for a single user. It contains a full record of what happened from the moment the event was triggered to when one or more messages were delivered or failed to deliver.

It includes:

• The subscriber details
• The workflow (template) used
• The event payload
• Jobs executed
• Messages generated
• Delivery status updates and errors

All these properties can be seen from the Notification API response and are also displayed in the Novu dashboard’s Activity Feed for visual traceability.

Message

Message is the final phase in the notification lifecycle. It is the actual notification content that is sent to the subscriber from the workflow.

Messages are delivered to your users using any or all of the channels defined in your workflow, and each message can be customized for each channel.

Messages are live entities and can be tracked in real-time, with full visibility into channels used, delivery status and other important properties from the Message API response.