The production platform vs. the send-side platform
Knak produces enterprise email, landing pages, and mobile messages, coordinating the workflow from Figma through personalization and approval to your marketing automation platform. Litmus, now part of Validity Engage, works on the email once it exists: rendering, testing, deliverability, and post-send analytics. Most teams need both jobs done. The question is which one is your constraint.
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The quick take
Knak is the AI production layer for enterprise marketing teams. Designers push finished work from Figma. Marketers personalize, add dynamic content, and translate into any language. Reviewers sign off through tiered approvals. The finished email, landing page, or mobile message syncs natively to Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, or HubSpot. Cross-client and dark mode testing sit inside that same workspace, across 105 email client, device, and operating system configurations, so the asset never leaves the production workflow to get checked.
Validity acquired Litmus in April 2025, and Litmus now runs inside Validity Engage alongside live monitoring, contact data quality, and Validity's deliverability stack. Its strongest capabilities work on an email that already exists: previews across more than 100 email clients, spam and inbox placement checks, and analytics on how the send performed. Validity's own platform agents follow the same pattern, flagging rendering and compliance risks before a send and monitoring subscriber experience after one.
The two platforms meet in the middle and start from opposite ends. Litmus starts at the send and works backward toward the email. Knak starts at the brief and works forward through everything that has to happen before an email is ready to send at all: the design handoff, the personalization, the translations, the approval chain, and the deployment into the MAP. Email is the whole scope for one. Email, landing pages, and mobile messages are the output of a broader production workflow for the other.
How Knak compares to Litmus (Validity Engage)
| Feature | Knak | Litmus (Validity Engage) |
|---|---|---|
| Platform scope | Email, landing pages, and mobile messages in one production platform | Email only |
| Where it starts | The brief: design handoff, creation, personalization, translation, approval, deployment | The finished email: rendering, testing, deliverability, performance |
| Design tool integration | Figma-first: one-click push from Figma into Knak, no manual rebuild | No Figma integration |
| Integration model | Native bi-directional sync with Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, HubSpot | ESP and MAP connectors for importing drafts and returning tested HTML |
| Governance and approvals | Tiered: locked brand elements, permissions by role, fast lanes for routine work, escalated review for high-stakes campaigns | Collaboration, comments, and review workflows |
| Testing | 105 client, device, and OS previews in light and dark mode, inside the creation workspace | Previews across 100+ email clients, automated QA, spam testing, live post-send monitoring |
| Deliverability and inbox placement | Not in scope; handled by your MAP and deliverability tooling | Core strength: inbox placement, sender reputation, authentication and blocklist monitoring |
| Post-send analytics | Performance Insights on assets produced in Knak | Core strength: engagement analytics and ROI reporting across the program |
| Translation and localization | Built in, with AI translation into up to 75 languages and a custom pipeline for teams running their own vendors | Not a platform capability |
| AI in the workflow | Generates first drafts, translates, runs brand checks, and produces assets directly from Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini via the Knak MCP Server | Platform agents that flag pre-send risk, monitor deliverability, and generate copy variants |
| Customer profile | Meta, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, Uber | High-volume senders across travel, retail, and consumer brands |
| Best for | Enterprise teams producing email, landing pages, and mobile messages at volume across distributed regions and approval chains | Teams whose constraint is send quality, rendering coverage, and inbox placement |
What enterprise production looks like
Testing tells you whether an email is ready, but it does not tell you how the email got made, who approved it, how it reached six regions in nine languages, or why it took eleven days. Those are production questions, and they are where enterprise teams lose their time.
From Figma to your MAP in one pipeline
Designers create in Figma and push into Knak with one click. The design arrives ready for marketers to add personalization, dynamic content, and translations. No manual rebuild, no interpretation errors, no annotated PDFs going back and forth. Reviewers sign off, and the finished asset syncs directly to Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, or HubSpot.
Litmus does not integrate with Figma, so the design handoff happens somewhere else, before the email ever arrives for testing.
For teams where the designer handoff is the slow step, this is the difference between a multi-day cycle and an afternoon.
Testing where the email is produced
Knak includes cross-client preview and dark mode preview in the same workspace where the email is produced, covering 105 email client, device, and operating system configurations across desktop, mobile, tablet, and webmail. Administrators choose which of those clients their team tests against. A marketer building an email checks how it renders without exporting anything, without switching tools, and without waiting for a separate review pass. The check happens while the work is still in hand and easy to change.
Litmus publishes comparable breadth, more than 100 email clients, with automated QA checks and spam testing layered on top of the previews. The meaningful difference is less about how many clients each one covers and more about where the check happens: testing in Litmus is its own step, with the asset moving between systems to get there.
Which of those matters more depends on what your team gets wrong most often. Teams that need spam testing and inbox placement folded into the same pass have a real reason to run a dedicated testing platform alongside whatever produces the email. Teams whose emails are late rather than broken are looking at a production problem, and more testing depth will not fix it.
Governance that matches the work
Enterprise teams do not treat every email the same. A regional newsletter does not need the approval chain a product launch does. Knak's tiered model reflects that: locked brand elements protect what should never change, flexible sections let marketers produce within defined boundaries, routine work moves through fast lanes, and high-stakes campaigns get the full review chain.
Litmus offers collaboration, comments, and review workflows for the testing and approval stage. The controls sit around the review of a finished email rather than around who can produce what in the first place.
Email, landing pages, and mobile messages together
Knak produces email, landing pages, and mobile messages in one platform, sharing the same brand controls, approval workflows, and MAP integrations. A campaign that needs an email and a matching landing page, or a text send alongside both, is one workflow rather than separate tools stitched together by hand. Knak's Mobile Message Builder brings SMS and RCS into the same environment, and generates an SMS fallback for an RCS message in one pass, so the send still reaches a recipient whose device or carrier doesn't support RCS.
Litmus is email only, so landing pages and mobile messaging sit outside the platform's scope.
Translation and localization
Knak translates with built-in AI into up to 75 languages, with a custom pipeline through partners like TransPerfect and Smartling for teams that run their own translation vendors. Localized versions inherit the same brand controls and approvals as the original, so a campaign going to nine regions is one production process rather than nine.
Translation is a production step, which puts it outside what a testing and deliverability platform sets out to do.
AI agents work inside the production system
Marketers are no longer the only ones producing inside Knak. The Knak MCP Server, live in alpha for Enterprise customers, connects Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other MCP-compatible AI platforms directly to a Knak instance. An agent can browse the brands, campaigns, and themes available to an account, search existing assets, and generate a new email from a natural-language prompt that specifies the brand and campaign. The asset gets built and saved inside Knak, not mocked up somewhere else and pasted in.
The same brand controls apply either way. Locked elements and approved templates constrain what an AI agent can produce inside Knak the same way they constrain a human builder, so the governance model doesn't change just because the request came from an agent instead of a person.
Validity Engage runs its own platform agents, pointed at pre-send risk and deliverability monitoring rather than at producing the asset.
Which platform is right for you?
Consider Knak if
- Your team produces email, landing pages, and mobile messages at volume across distributed regions
- Designers work in Figma and the handoff into email production is the slow step
- You run Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, or HubSpot and need assets to live natively inside the MAP
- Approval chains, brand controls, and permissions need to differ by campaign type
- Localization is part of every campaign and translation cycles cost you weeks
- Enterprise security and compliance requirements are part of procurement
Consider Litmus (Validity Engage) if
- Inbox placement and deliverability are your primary problem
- Spam testing, automated QA, and live post-send monitoring need to run on every send
- Contact data quality and list hygiene sit on the same roadmap
- Your constraint is send quality rather than production volume
What customers say
We avoided $2 million in incremental costs, allowing us to scale and grow at the necessary pace.”
Charles Eichenbaum
Director of Demand Operations and Marketer Enablement, Google
No one needs to know how to code, we went from two builders at Palo Alto to now nearly 200.”
Gina Novacco
Senior Global Digital Campaign Ops, Palo Alto Networks
User-friendly and primed for scale - it's just what we needed to speed up our campaign deployment.”
Patrick Monk
Head of Marketing Strategy and Operations, Uber
Frequently asked questions
Knak includes cross-client and dark mode preview inside the production workspace, across 105 email client, device, and operating system configurations, so most teams check rendering as part of producing the email rather than as a separate pass. Teams with specialized deliverability or spam-testing requirements often keep a dedicated tool alongside it. The two are not mutually exclusive, and plenty of enterprise stacks run both.
No. Deliverability is a function of your sending infrastructure, your domain reputation, and your list quality, which live in your marketing automation platform and your deliverability tooling. Knak produces the asset and syncs it natively into the MAP that sends it.
Performance Insights reports on the assets produced in Knak, covering opens, clicks, email client breakdown, and mobile versus desktop. Program-wide engagement analytics and ROI reporting across every channel remain the job of your MAP or a dedicated analytics platform.
Most teams are producing their first assets within days, with full team adoption in two to four weeks. A dedicated customer success team maps your current process and configures the platform to match how your team already works.
Knak integrates natively with Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and HubSpot. These are bi-directional syncs rather than one-way exports. Assets, tokens, and personalization move between systems automatically, so nothing gets rebuilt on the other side.
They do not need to. Marketers produce responsive emails and landing pages visually, adding dynamic content and personalization inside the same workspace. Teams on Marketo can go further with Velocity scripting, Marketo's native templating language, for advanced logic, without leaving Knak.
Permissions control who can modify what, and locked brand elements protect the things that should never change. Routine work moves through fast lanes while high-stakes campaigns get the full review chain. Different teams can hold different permission levels based on their role and the work they produce.
Designers create in Figma and push into Knak with one click. The design arrives ready for personalization, dynamic content, and translation. No manual rebuild and no interpretation errors between the design file and the finished email.
Knak produces landing pages and mobile messages alongside email in the same platform, with the same brand controls, approval workflows, and MAP integrations. Campaigns that need any combination of the three are one workflow.
See Knak in action
Get a custom demo using your own brand assets and campaign goals. See how enterprise teams at Google, Palo Alto Networks, and Uber coordinate email production at scale.
