Knock vs Depot
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Knock keeps widening from a notifications API into an agent-driven engagement platform
Knock remains a developer-first notifications infrastructure product, but recent releases push past send-a-message plumbing. The last month added warehouse sync for delivery and engagement events, a hosted end-user preference center, dashboard MFA, and faster workflow testing. Data now moves both into Knock (Shopify) and back out to the warehouse.
Two arcs stand out: an agentic control surface — a Slack agent that creates and schedules resources, plus dashboard/CLI/agent parity for building audiences — and a maturing enterprise posture via MFA, the preference center, and warehouse analytics. Knock is positioning as a system of record for customer engagement, not just a delivery layer.
Expect the agent surface to deepen so more resources are manageable conversationally, and more data connectors after Shopify, given the warehouse-sync and dynamic-audiences direction.
Depot extends from build acceleration into hosted source control with Depot Code.
Depot is broadening from a CI and build-cache company into a full developer-infrastructure platform. This cycle it launched Depot Code — a diskless git server backed by S3 blob storage — into private beta, moved CI and Sandboxes onto a re-architected Depot Metal compute tier, and kept extending Depot CI with new triggers, snapshot improvements, OIDC auth, and Datadog observability.
The direction is a vertically integrated build-and-source stack: Depot Code stores git packfiles as S3 objects and runs stateless git workers, mirroring the same storage-compute separation behind Depot Metal. Each piece plugs into Depot CI, so the company is assembling an end-to-end alternative to the hub-and-spoke GitHub model rather than just accelerating it. The CI surface is maturing in parallel with reliability and integration features.
Expect Depot Code to move toward wider access and tighter Depot CI integration, and GitHub Actions runners and container builds to migrate onto Depot Metal over the coming months as promised.
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