The Neighbours

Scope: the honest map of what else does this job, and when each is the better pick. ntfy was run throughout the guide; everything in this chapter is described, not run, and is labelled that way — descriptions of the neighbours come from their own documentation, and none of them was installed in the lab.

Gotify — the closest relative: a small self-hosted server with its own web UI, its own phone app, and an API of applications and clients rather than open topics. The shape differs in one honest way: Gotify's model is your server for your devices, and every sender is a registered application with a token, where ntfy's model is topics anyone can use until locked. Pick Gotify if the registered- sender model suits you and you never wanted a public server; pick ntfy if the "one curl, no enrolment" start is the point.

Pushover — the hosted veteran. A commercial service: a paid app, a generous monthly message allowance, delivery over the vendors' own push channels, and an email address you can send to that becomes a notification. No server to run at all. Pick it if running a server — yours or trusting ntfy.sh — is the part you want to not do, and a per-device app fee is fair for that.

Apprise — not a service but a translator: a library and command-line tool that takes one message and delivers it to dozens of endpoints — ntfy among them, plus email, chat services, and the other tools here. Pick it when the destination is the variable: a script that should reach "whatever I'm using this year" sends once, to Apprise, and the URL decides the rest. It composes with ntfy rather than competing with it.

Email, and its gateway cousins — the neighbour that was already there. An SMTP server will deliver your backup's confession to every device you own, with attachments, archives, and search, for no new software. What it will not do is insist: email arrives when the mail app feels like fetching, sorted into a pile. ntfy itself can forward a message as email (the X-Email header) — a documented feature needing an SMTP server behind the ntfy server, listed as documented-only in criteria.md. Pick email when "eventually, and kept" beats "now."

The line through all four: every one of these will move a short message from a computer to a person. They differ in who runs the pipe, what a sender must enrol as, and whether the pipe can knock loudly. ntfy's answers — a pipe you can host in an afternoon, senders that are one HTTP request, and a priority field that reaches the phone's idea of loud — are the ones this guide measured.