Top 7 Airship Alternatives in 2026

A customer engagement platform plays a crucial role in today's business landscape by nurturing and engaging customers throughout their lifecycles.

One such famous CEP is Airship which is meant for both outside and inside mobile app engagement, lifecycle marketing, and analytics and data solutions for enterprises.

However, the CEP that businesses are using today may not necessarily remain popular among customers in the future. Additionally, new platforms continue to emerge constantly, leading to diverse alternatives to Airship.

A close look at Airship

Apart from being called a CEP, Airship is also called a MAX (Mobile App Experience) platform through its App Experience Platform (AXP) capabilities. This provides app experience solutions and analytics to activate, retain and monetize app audiences without ongoing developer support.

With Airship, you can also create and deliver personalized messages in real-time using various digital channels such as push notifications, email, SMS, and basic in-app messages. Besides that, Airship provides comprehensive analytics that tracks and analyzes every communication you send to users.

Airship has four major feature segments:

• Messaging: Their flagship product both outside and inside (basic) the app - sends messages to an audience of users.
• Mobile wallet: Create passes for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
• Real-Time Data Streaming: a real-time event stream reflecting user actions, device changes, and server-side actions, allowing you to gather insights on app usage and communication effectiveness.
• Performance Analytics: Actionable insights through Airship's event stream API and analytics dashboard.

Other key features of Airship include:

• A/B Testing: Experiment with message variations to optimize campaigns and resonate with users.
• Precision Targeting: Utilize Airship's advanced targeting tools for personalized messaging based on user behavior and preferences.
• Automation and Orchestration: Streamline messaging workflows with automated triggers and personalized drip campaigns.
• AI-Powered Predictive Features: Ability to leverage AI for optimized messaging and improved user retention.

With a variety of features intact, one of the biggest challenges faced by Airship users is navigating a complex dashboard with different UIs for each channel, making it difficult to configure messages consistently across channels. Hence, listed below are the top Airship alternatives.

OneSignal

OneSignal presents a strong alternative to Airship by offering a robust analytics suite with conversion tracking and several advantages. Its unlimited API and freemium model make it a highly accessible self-serve option, particularly advantageous for smaller businesses looking to get started without obstacles.

Airship might be ideal for well-resourced teams with ample budgets and dedicated engineering resources, whereas OneSignal is designed to simplify messaging workflows for companies with limited dev resources.

While Airship pioneered the delivery of mobile push notifications, it has been slower in adopting newer technology trends. For instance, Airship added support for Web Push in March 2017, whereas OneSignal had already supported web push two years earlier in April 2015.

Although Airship offers an array of enterprise-grade features, its high price tag can serve as a barrier to entry for small and medium-sized businesses that need a scalable growth solution. Compared to Airship, OneSignal offer a greater variety of plans with more accessible features, so you can get exactly what you need at every step of your journey.

Customer.io

Customer.io is a powerful and flexible solution for personalized messaging through email and mobile platforms. By utilizing its user-friendly drag-and-drop workflow builder, Customer.io enables the smooth integration of various channels into one campaign, such as email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, and webhooks.

Airship is primarily known as a mobile push messaging tool, while Customer.io can be categorized as an engagement and lifecycle marketing tool. Moreover, Customer.io is mainly focused on serving SMBs and startups. 80% of all Customer.io customers spend less than $1K per month.

Customer.io charges based on the maximum number of uniquely identified users (profiles) in the account. While Airship's pricing for 250,000 Monthly Active Contacts starts at approximately $35,000/yr and includes an onboarding fee. Pricing likely increases based on the number of contacts recorded in Airship. Due to this, Airship is widely considered as one of the most expensive options.

Braze

Braze is a CEP that assists businesses in collecting user data and providing personalized messaging across multiple channels. Like Airship, it mainly targets mobile-first businesses but mostly for mid-markets.

Braze belongs to the "Voice and SMS" category of the tech stack, while Airship can be primarily classified under "Mobile Push Messaging".

The unique feature of Braze is its Predictive Suite which is absent in Airship. This feature gives marketers access to machine learning tools that identify at-risk consumers or those with a high purchasing propensity. Braze also provides a Canvas Flow feature for building multi-channel automated campaigns, albeit exclusive to annual plan users.

Apart from this, Braze’s cross-channel capabilities cover everything from email marketing, reporting, data analytics, in-app messaging, machine learning technologies, send-time optimization features, mobile notifications, and more. It also offers SMS marketing features for sending personalized, two-way messages that boost engagement and re-engage lapsed customers.

Iterable

Iterable serves as a cross-channel marketing platform, enabling you to send targeted messages, access real-time reporting for valuable insights, and automate lifecycle messaging. Similar to other alternatives, Iterable supports various communication channels such as push notifications, SMS, email, and more to reach and engage consumers effectively. It targets mobile-first mid-market to enterprise businesses.

With the “catalog” feature, Iterable stands unique from Airship by empowering to generate real-time content that can be dynamically delivered to customers based on their specific behavior.

Iterable’s new “embedded message” feature effortlessly integrates native message placements that dynamically adapt to individual user data, with no coding required. This is something which is not provided by Airship yet.

In terms of pricing, however, customers will typically find Iterable to be less expensive than Airship.

CleverTap

CleverTap is a well-known customer engagement and retention platform that operates on a SaaS model. Its all-in-one platform combines the best omnichannel communication, analytics, segmentation, and engagement tools so that companies gain valuable real-time insights into their customers.

Additionally, unlike the above options, this platform has integrated with WhatsApp, given it is a relevant channel of communication in APAC. Apart from being a CEP, CleverTap also acts as a CDP (Customer Data Platform) that tracks every customer interaction and leverages enriched data to create targeted user segmentation.

But, it should be noted that in-app engagement is poor in CleverTap with limited customizations for various UI elements and a lack of real-time triggering mechanisms.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is particularly well-suited for addressing eCommerce needs. Moreover, in contrast to the aforementioned alternatives, Klaviyo has seamlessly incorporated Facebook and Instagram into its platform, recognizing their significance as crucial communication channels for the E-Commerce industry.

‍

Klaviyo also serves as a CDP which enables to ingest, manage, enrich, and use all the customer data on a single platform which Airship is not capable of. Also, when comparing the quality of ongoing product support, reviewers felt that Klaviyo is the preferred option.

Emarsys

Emarsys is known for helping marketers deliver personalized, 1:1 experiences across multiple channels and drive business outcomes. Like the others, Emarsys also provides push, email, SMS capability.

Emarsys specializes in providing email marketing solutions specifically designed for mid-market and SMBs in the eCommerce industry, catering to businesses with a substantial number of products.

One distinctive feature that sets Emarsys apart from Iterable is its block-based email campaign creation interface, allowing users to create emails with ease. This interface also offers advanced-level customization options, granting users full control over their email designs.

Downsides of Airship and its alternatives

In a nutshell, Airship and its alternatives specialize predominantly in outside-app engagement channels like push notifications, emails, and SMS.

However, these channels have become saturated over the past decade, resulting in declining click-through rates (CTRs) and reduced effectiveness. Nowadays, it is crucial for B2C brands to communicate with their users while they are using the app itself, by adopting in-app engagement strategies.

How to choose the right Airship alternative?

Ultimately, the best Airship alternative or competitor for your business will depend on your specific needs, goals, and preferences. Here are key some key takeaways:

1. OneSignal and Customer.io have a self-serve motion which is easier to get started with and suits most SMBs and startups.
2. Braze and Iterable are good alternatives to Airship if you're a mobile-first mid-market or enterprise company.
3. CleverTap is more dominant in India/APAC - if you're in these regions, WhatsApp can be an important marketing channel. CleverTap can be the right choice in this case as it allows marketing on WhatsApp.
4. Klaviyo and Emarsys stands out as a top choice for solving eCommerce use cases predominantly.
5. All the above excel only in outside-app engagement channels like push, email, and SMS.

Final thoughts

By thoroughly researching and comparing the above options, you can make a well-informed choice that aligns with your customer engagement strategy in 2026 and beyond.

If you're interested in learning more about how you can engage your users inside your app to help you drive activation, retention, and monetization metrics, check out our ultimate guide to in-app nudges.