Webhooks vs Polling
When you need to react to something happening in another system, you have two choices: ask repeatedly (polling) or be told (webhooks). Here's how to decide.
Polling: ask, and ask again
Polling means your application calls an API on a schedule — every 5 seconds, every minute, every hour — checking whether anything has changed since last time. It's the "are we there yet?" approach.
Polling is simple to build: it's just a loop with a timer. There's no public endpoint to expose, no signatures to verify, and it works behind a firewall. But it has real costs.
Webhooks: be told the moment it happens
With webhooks, you register a URL once and the provider pushes an HTTP request to it the instant an event occurs. There's no loop and no wasted requests — you only do work when there's actually something to do. See What is a webhook? for the fundamentals.
Side-by-side
| Polling | Webhooks | |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | As slow as your poll interval | Near real-time |
| Efficiency | Most requests return "nothing new" | One request per real event |
| Setup complexity | Low — just a timer | Higher — public URL + signatures |
| Needs a public endpoint | No | Yes |
| Rate limits | Easy to hit | Rarely an issue |
| Missed events | Won't miss — you re-query state | Possible if your endpoint is down |
When polling is the right choice
- The provider doesn't offer webhooks at all.
- You can't expose a public HTTPS endpoint (locked-down corporate network, batch job, CLI tool).
- You only need data occasionally — a nightly sync doesn't need real-time push.
- You need a guaranteed-complete view of state and can tolerate latency.
When webhooks are the right choice
- You need to react quickly — payments, messages, deployments.
- Events are frequent enough that polling would waste a lot of requests.
- You're hitting API rate limits because of aggressive polling.
- The provider's webhook payload contains everything you need.
The best answer is often "both"
Mature integrations use webhooks for low-latency reactions and a periodic reconciliation poll as a safety net. The webhook handles the common case instantly; a slow background poll catches anything missed while your endpoint was briefly down. This belt-and-suspenders pattern gives you real-time speed without the "what if I missed one?" anxiety.
Rule of thumb: webhooks for speed, polling for certainty. If correctness matters, reconcile periodically even when webhooks are working.
Testing the webhook side
If you're moving from polling to webhooks, the first hurdle is simply seeing what the provider sends. Generate a webhook URL, point the provider at it, and inspect the real payload before writing a line of handler code.
Try the webhook tester →