Quickstart Guide

Set up your OneSignal app and start sending messages!

Create your organization

Sign up at onesignal.com to create an account. Your organization will be your operational base for managing your apps and communication channels.

Create Organization

Add an app

After setting up your organization, the next step is to add an app. This involves naming your app and selecting the initial channel or platform you'd like to set up.

Add App

Set up your channels

OneSignal supports a wide array of messaging channels and platforms, allowing you to engage with your audience wherever they are. Setting up your app and channels is a crucial step to ensure your messages reach your audience effectively.

Set Up Channels

Pick your first channel and follow the setup guide to start sending. Send this page to your developers if using push notifications, in-app messages or live activities!

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Channel setup

Visit the Channel Setup page to get started!

Understand users & subscriptions

As users subscribe to your messaging channels, they are assigned a OneSignal ID (OneSignal's User ID) and Subscription ID (OneSignal's unique channel/device ID). Users may have multiple Subscriptionsdepending on how many channels you setup and how they interact with your app.


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Users & Subscriptions

Users are considered anonymous until you set your own External ID to identify the user across all their subscriptions.

See Users and Subscriptions for more details.

Make a segment

When sending out message campaigns from the dashboard, you'll need to create an Audience. Your Audience is composed of Subscriptions grouped by segments.

For example, you can use data tags to build a segment.

Segment Editor

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Create your audience with segments

Visit our Segments page to learn all the ways to group users into audiences.

Send messages

Depending on which channels you setup, you can now start designing and sending messages.

If you are not ready to send yet, you can always setup Templates or Drafts to save for later when ready to send!

Send to your Audience

Image showing push editor message contents


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Sending messages

See our Messages section for the different channel guides. You can also get your ideas saved for later with Templates or Drafts.

Set your users on a journey

To take full advantage of omni-channel marketing! You can house all your push, email, and sms Subscriptions for a project in a single OneSignal App and set them on a Journey.

Example of an Abandoned Cart Journey.

Example of an Abandoned Cart Journey.

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Setup journeys

Create onboarding, re-engagement, event-based and so many more automations with Journeys.


What’s Next

Take a look at our Setup Guides