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What's the difference between flutter_local_notifications and awesome_notifications packages for notification?

After reading through docs and repository I understood, that historically awesome_notifications had Push-notification feature built-in and no firebase_messaging was needed. But that raised issues as people used both awesome_notifications and firebase_messaging, which led to problems when used in conjunction.

So the author of awesome_notifications removed Push-notification and kept it local.

Which leads to a question: if awesome_notifications is now a plugin for local notifications, what does it have now that flutter_local_notifications doesn't have?

So why would we need awesome_notifications plugin?

Konstantin Kozirev
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4 Answers4

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I've managed to reach the creator of awesome_notifications plugin and he answered on this question. To let others know here's his answer:

The philosophy behind awesome and flutter_local are totally opposed. Flutter_local just translates the native functions to Flutter, and you're going to need to do everything on your own. But there are some things that you’re not able to do only using dart, and you're going to struggle with them, such as badge management, interception of notification events, etc.

Awesome works by creating a middleware between native and flutter, handling the native complexity as much as possible to let the notification implementation in your app be as transparent as possible. It's not only about differences between Android and iOS, but also between Android distributions.

And awesome_notifications has a lot more features than flutter_local and covers a lot more services surrounding notifications, such as schedules and badge management.

They are not the same; in fact, they are very different.

Konstantin Kozirev
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My understanding is that awesome_notifications just adds some bells and whistles on flutter_local_notifications which is more minimalist. If you want to do the customization yourself use local_notifications, if you want something with more style out of the box use awesome_notifications.

Calholl
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    Thanks for the answer, could you please tell have you used **awesome_notifications**? I see that it hasn't been updated for 5 months, whereas **flutter_local_notifications** has more frequent updates and very recent. I'm just afraid that if I choose the first one it could be outdated and that would require to still migrate to better maintained one. – Konstantin Kozirev Jun 19 '22 at 08:17
  • I didn't use it, I stuck with local_notifications for the same reason. If there's some code in awesome notifications you like you can always go in and pull it out from the open source repo, or if you're really keen you could help maintain awesome_notifications repo - but from what I gather there's a lot of moving pieces with all the supported platforms. – Calholl Jul 01 '22 at 20:33
  • not clear a answer – Mohammad Rabiee Nasri Mar 24 '23 at 13:35
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The most important difference between awesome_notifications and flutter_local_notifications is:

awesome_notifications is not compatible with firebase_messaging and you need to use awesome_notifications_fcm instead to send cloud based push notifications. And awesome_notifications_fcm is not completely free. In free version there is a watermark shown. You need to pay to get rid of this watermark.

This is explained in awesome_notifications_fcm like this:

Local notifications using Awesome Notifications are always 100% free to use. And you can also test all push notifications features on Awesome Notifications FCM for free, Forever.

But to use Awesome Notifications FCM on release mode without the watermark [DEMO], you need to purchase a license key. This license key is a RSA digital signature, validated with private and public keys in conjunction with plugin versionings and your App ID / Bundle ID. Because of it, once the license key is generated for your app, its forever. It will never expires and do not require internet connection to be validated.

coolman
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awesome_notification is only compatible with awesome_notification_fcm, and awesome_notification is not free.

In my experience using awesome_notification, it is easy to use. It provides additional callbacks like

  1. dismiss notification callback
  2. created notification callback
  3. on display notification callback

and flutter_local_notification doesn't have that feature.

Actually it is free but with a watermark. I have never seen the watermark. Is it bothersome in the apps or not?

Can anyone show the watermark image ?

David
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Anan Alfred
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