Knock vs Windmill

Knock sells notification infrastructure — workflows, broadcasts, in-app guides, and multi-channel delivery that product teams wire up instead of building themselves. July was dense and unusually broad: a rebuilt Notion-style template editor, saved views and tags, schema management for how properties surface across the dashboard, passkey login, branch rebasing, and sandbox test runs that skip delay steps. Underneath the polish, two structural additions landed — message events syncing into the data warehouse, and a workflow step that pauses until an event arrives.

The developer-workflow half of the product is being treated like a codebase: branches that rebase onto main, tests that run in sandbox without delivering, tags and saved views for navigating a growing workspace. The engine half is moving in a different direction — toward workflows that hold state over time. A wait-for-event step, combined with the Clay data source triggering messaging as rows finish enriching, describes journeys rather than notifications. The analytics work is arriving twice over: raw events into the warehouse for teams with their own stack, and natural-language questions to the Knock agent for teams without one.

Wait-for-event is the primitive that makes journey-shaped use cases possible, so expect the next releases to address what it exposes — timeouts, observability into workflows sitting paused, and limits on how long one can wait before it becomes a support problem.