Prowl vs MQTT Loupe
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Prowl
Receive push notifications from your computer and various apps directly on your iOS device. Integrate the API into your own applications for custom alerts. Supports email-to-push and offers features like quiet hours and notification history.
- Push notifications from Mac/Windows
- Support for numerous apps/services
- Email to push functionality
- Customizable notification delivery
- Quiet Hours and Do Not Disturb modes
- Notification history and control
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Prowl is an easy push notifications client iOS. Push to your device notifications from your Mac or Windows computer, or from a multitude of apps and services. Easily integrate the Prowl API into your applications. A list of supported apps/services: http://prowlapp.com/apps.php The only limit of what the service can do is your imagination. REQUIREMENTS To receive notifications from your computer, you need the latest: • Growl on your Mac @ growl.info, or • Growl for Windows @ growlforwindows.com, or • Snarl on Windows @ fullphat.net, or • Any program or web service using the public API. THE CRITICS "I was extremely impressed with Prowl and the elegance with which I was able to view Growl notifications on my iPhone.” —Aron Trimble, TUAW "[A] powerful tool to connect your Mac with your iPhone, seamlessly over the air. —Federico Viticci, MacStories "Great idea. This opens up iPhone push notifications for anything you can think of.” —John Gruber, Daring Fireball "Probably the best $3 I’ve ever spent in the App Store.” —Darrell Etherington, The Apple Blog FEATURES • Push Notifications—When a Growl notification pops up on your computer, it's sent to Prowl and displayed on your iOS device within seconds. • Sweet application support—Prowl has support from a bunch of cool applications and services. Check out the full list at http://prowlapp.com/apps.php • Redirections—Launch a different application when you open a push notification. For example, a notification from your desktop Twitter client can relaunch into your favorite mobile client. You can even pick custom URLs to launch, so you can go anywhere! • Email to push—Use your Prowl email address (from the Prowl homepage's "API keys" tab) to get email delivery right on your device. Generate as many email addresses as you need! • An amazing API—Use the Prowl API with a multitude of libraries in various programming languages. You can send notifications from anything that can talk to the internet, and do some fun things along with it. • Quiet Hours—During the hours you specify, only the badge numbers are updated. No matter the source. Instead of getting a noisy alert, messages are quietly delivered. You can allow emergency-priority items to break quiet hours. • Do Not Disturb—Keep the application quiet whenever you're busy, or when you need a break from a constant alert. Controllable from within the application. • Control—Open the edit view to get a quick glance at your notifications, and do away with pesky ones. Quickly copy, email or SMS a notification directly from Prowl (depending on device and iOS version). • Browse quickly—Use Prowl's internal browser to quickly open links from a notification without having to open Safari. • History—Up to 10 days of notifications are kept on the server. You can delete notifications that you don't want to see any more, or remove all of your history. • Customized notifications—Only events you want are sent to Prowl. You can specify all kinds of conditions from the Prowl plugin for Growl. • Send any message to your device—From the Prowl website, you can send any text to your device: links and phone numbers are automatically linked, so you can easily navigate around without having to worry about typos. From the website or API, you can also automatically redirect to the attached URL. SETUP Prowl is built into Growl 2.0. For earlier versions: http://prowlapp.com/installation.php — for Mac. http://growlforwindows.com — for Windows. SUPPORT @prowlapp on Twitter http://prowlapp.com/support.php
MQTT Loupe
Inspect MQTT messages exchanged on a broker with this intuitive utility. Connect to brokers, subscribe to topics, and view message details. Features include JSON highlighting, hex viewer, and secure connection options.
- Inspect MQTT messages
- Connect to any MQTT broker
- Subscribe to topics
- Full-text search across topics
- JSON highlighting
- Hex viewer for binary payloads
- Secure connection options
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MQTT Loupe is an intuitive utility to inspect MQTT messages exchanged on an MQTT broker. Connect to any public or local MQTT broker, subscribe to topics and view details of messages being transmitted. Don't remember that one message or topic? Fire up the search to find it instantly using full-text search through all topics, and results updating live with new hits appearing as they arrive. With built-in JSON highlighting, this app is perfect for monitoring Zigbee2Mqtt. And if you need to work with binary message payloads, the built-in hex viewer has you covered. Got frequently used topics that are further down the hierarchy? Make them favorites for easy and instant access. Concerned about security? Let the server's certificate be validated before connecting; you don't have to allow insecure connections based on untrusted certificates. Need more? Provide a client certificate to authenticate yourself against the server. All features in a nutshell: - clean and simple interface - hierarchical topic view - sidebar with history of recently opened topics - powerful full-text search capabilities across all topics and for a single message - search results are automatically updated when new messages arrive - extended message details, with proper formatting and syntax highlighting of JSON messages - support for binary message payloads, displayed as either ISO Latin-1 or in a hex view - easily copy any topic or message value - authentication with username/password or client certificates - connect over MQTT or WebSocket protocol - support for MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 - support for SSL/TLS - support for the Server Name Indication (SNI) TLS extension - support for self-signed certificates - full server certificate validation - manage and connect multiple brokers at once - full support for quality of service
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: MQTT Loupe at Free against Prowl's $2.99. MQTT Loupe also leads on update cadence (every 3 weeks vs every 7 months) and rating (5.0 vs 4.6). Prowl's advantage is review sentiment (87% vs 50%) and ratings volume (107 vs 1). On ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
MQTT Loupe is free to download; Prowl costs $2.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
MQTT Loupe holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.6. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Prowl has 107 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 87% of Prowl's written reviews are positive against 50% of MQTT Loupe's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Prowl ships an update every 7 months, MQTT Loupe every 3 weeks. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 3, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Prowl | MQTT Loupe |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $2.99 | Free — better |
| Rating | 4.6 (107 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 86.9% of reviews — better | 50.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 107 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 7 months | Every 3 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 8.0 — better | 13.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 3 MB | 6 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Prowl Solutions LLC | Jakob Bieling |
Customer experience
Prowl
MQTT Loupe
Bugs and requests
Prowl
Reported bugs
2 issues- Inconsistent notification delivery
- Login issues on mobile app
Requested features
4 requests- Support for modern iPhone screen sizes
- Custom notification sounds
- Improved notification management (e.g. delete multiple)
- Integration with Apple Watch
MQTT Loupe
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Prowl
No in-app purchases
MQTT Loupe
No in-app purchases









