If you are looking for a comparison between the two plugins: Notification and Better Notifications for WordPress this is the article for you. The in-depth descriptions will help you see all the differences and will clarify which one is better in your case.
Below you will find the table with a general comparison and in the lower part – the detailed breakdown.
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Notification | Better Notifications for WordPress | |
| Ability to compose unlimited notifications with custom content |  | |
| Easy testing |  | |
| Easily extendible with custom triggers and merge tags | | |
| An easy way to compose the notification | | |
| Notifications other than Email | | |
| Support | Priority | Standard |
| Premium extensions | | |
Notifications
Both plugins allow you to set as many notifications as you want for all the various scenarios. You create the content of the Notification with merge tags and shortcodes and you have the complete control over how that looks and for who it’s send.
Better Notifications for WordPress is only not allowing you to type in the recipient’s email by hand. You have to select the specific User or Role. Notification plugin allows you to add various recipients, like:
- Freetype Email
- Merge Tag
- WordPress Administrator
- WordPress User
- WordPress User Role
The Notification plugin also allows you to send the other types of the notifications, like Webhook and many more with premium extensions. The Better Notifications for WordPress supports only Email notification.
Testing
The Better Notifications for WordPress has a cool way to test the notification – just a single button click. Works awesome, but it doesn’t render any shortcodes in the Subject or Body. You can just check the deliverability and general formatting.
The Notification plugin doesn’t have any function like this. After adding new Notification you have to test the scenario manually, ie. by publishing the post if you added the “Post published” notification. This way all the merge tags are rendered and you can see exactly how the notification works with your content.
Developer API
The Notification plugin has been created by a developer for developers to solve own, real word problem. You can take a look at the documentation to see how easy it is to create own Trigger or add a Merge Tag to existing one. It’s just super simple and intuitive to extend it. You can also bundle it with your own plugin or theme just like the ACF plugin and use the White label mode.
The Better Notifications for WordPress code is really tightly coupled so you don’t really have an ability to extend it. It was created strictly for the end users. All you can do is fork it, but it’s not really ideal or convenient way.
Admin UI/UX
The Notification plugin tries to take the UX to the next level. All the Merge Tags you can use are displayed directly in the sidebar and they are changing each time you change the Trigger. The Better Notifications for WordPress doesn’t display any list in the admin so you have to go to the external documentation.
Also, you can disable/enable the notification directly from the notifiactions table using the Notification plugin. BNFW allows you to do this only from the notification edit screen.
Premium extensions
Both plugins have a set of premium add-ons which allows you to extend their abilities even more. Main ones are the Custom Fields and Conditional Logic but there are also many more.
Hi
I was looking at both plugins and some contact with you guys as well.
The reason, why we went with Better Notifications is the trigger “On Role Change” of a user.
This comes out of the box with Better Notifications.
Other than that, I would have gone with your plugin, as it looks more cleaned up.
Best,
Hi Aldo, the trigger has been implemented in our plugin!
Does either Notification or BNFW allow an individual override to the update post/page notifications from the back-end in order to make a change that one doesn’t want to bother users about. It is a pain to go back to the dashboard to temporarily disable and then re-enable the notification. If it were inside the page/post editing window as a one-time change, it would be much easier.
So far, because I discovered BNFW first, I’m using that one for most notifications, but am using Notification for front-end (BuddyForms) posts. I’m happy to switch over if the override facility could be implemented.
I don’t know about BNFW, but Notification had this feature a long time ago. We had to drop it because the plugin has become very elastic and it’s difficult to target specific notification due to the hidden context. But the second thought… maybe it will be possible? I’ll add the free extension to my todo list and we’ll see if we can do something about it!
Thanks. I hope you can create an override feature within the free version. I created a website for our small organization for retirees but it is a Multisite instance because each group of members belongs to a separate “course” and each course has its own “site.” It becomes very expensive to purchase paid add-ons when each site is counted separately. As a result, I’m pretty much limited to free versions.
I understand. The good news is that we are going to make Multisite support as well and it’s going to be free!