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Choose webhook push when you need timely updates, the provider supports the events you need, and your system can safely receive public HTTPS requests. Choose polling when periodic freshness is enough, inbound connectivity is unavailable, or no suitable subscription exists. For important data, a practical design is often both: use webhooks for prompt notification and API reads to reconcile state.
How do webhooks differ from polling?
A webhook subscription asks a provider to send an HTTP request to your server when a subscribed event occurs. Polling reverses the direction: your application calls the provider’s API on a schedule to check whether anything changed. GitHub describes webhooks as event-triggered deliveries and says they can reduce effort and resource use, scale better when monitoring many resources, and provide near-real-time updates; those benefits depend on GitHub’s service and are not a guarantee for every provider. GitHub’s webhook overview explains its model.
| Decision | Webhook push | Polling |
|---|---|---|
| Freshness | Event-triggered and potentially near real time; delivery may still be delayed or fail under the provider’s policy. | Set by the polling schedule; longer intervals mean older observations. |
| Network | Requires a receiver the provider can reach, typically a public HTTPS endpoint. | The client initiates requests, useful when the application cannot accept inbound calls. |
| Request volume | Delivers subscribed events; limiting subscriptions to needed event types avoids irrelevant traffic. | Repeated checks consume API calls and may use quota, particularly across many resources. |
| Failure handling | You must validate, acknowledge, deduplicate, and recover from failed or missed deliveries. | You control scheduling and client retries, subject to API behavior and rate limits. |
| Security work | Protect the endpoint, verify transport and event signatures, and store secrets safely. | Protect API credentials and follow the source API’s authentication and rate-limit rules. |
Which should you choose?
Choose push for timely reactions
Use a subscription when the source exposes the required event types and the value of prompt reaction justifies operating a reachable receiver. Examples include starting a workflow when a change occurs or updating an integration soon after a source-side event. Subscribe only to the events you actually process.
Choose polling for controlled, periodic checks
Polling fits applications that cannot receive inbound requests, sources without usable subscriptions, and situations where a delay of one polling interval is acceptable. Choose a cadence based on the freshness you need and the provider’s quotas; there is no universal safe interval.
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Combine them when missing state matters
Use push to learn about changes quickly, then periodically read the source API and compare it with local state. This reconciliation path can find gaps after missed or exhausted deliveries. Its schedule should reflect the cost of stale data, available API quota, and provider capabilities.
What does a webhook delivery guarantee mean?
A successful HTTP acknowledgement reports what happened to that delivery attempt under the provider’s rules. It does not prove that every downstream business effect completed exactly once. Across providers, delivery can be duplicated, delayed, retried, or ultimately missed. Design the receiver to tolerate duplicates and provide a recovery path rather than assuming a universal exactly-once or fixed-time guarantee.
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Retries and recovery differ by provider
GitHub recommends redelivering missed deliveries after downtime. Its X-GitHub-Delivery header identifies a delivery; a requested redelivery retains the same header, making it useful as a deduplication key. See GitHub’s webhook best practices.
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Do not confuse delivery retries with API idempotency
Deduplicating a webhook delivery is different from making an API request safe to retry. Stripe’s idempotency documentation concerns API requests: repeated requests with the same key return the saved result, and keys may be pruned once they are at least 24 hours old. Reusing a key after pruning can create a new request. This is not a blanket promise about webhook delivery. See Stripe’s idempotent request documentation.
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How should you secure and operate a webhook receiver?
- Expose a protected HTTPS endpoint. Keep certificate verification enabled. TLS protects the transport; signature validation checks origin and integrity according to the provider’s scheme. They address related but different risks. GitHub’s best practices cover HTTPS and endpoint safeguards.
- Keep secrets out of URLs and source control. Store signing secrets in secure configuration rather than hard-coding them or including them in request URLs.
- Validate the signature against the original request body. For GitHub, retain the original request bytes, compute the expected HMAC SHA-256 signature with the secret, and compare it in constant time. Follow the provider’s own signing scheme; see GitHub’s delivery validation guide.
- Check the event type and action. Apply business logic only to events and actions your integration handles. Providers may add event types or actions over time.
- Deduplicate before triggering side effects. Persist a stable delivery or event identifier and enforce uniqueness with a database constraint or equivalent guard. Make repeat processing safe wherever possible. The Standard Webhooks specification describes interoperable design recommendations; not every provider necessarily implements it.
- Durably accept work, then acknowledge promptly. Validate and safely hand off the event before returning success. Slow downstream operations can run asynchronously after the payload is durably queued. GitHub says a receiver should return a 2XX response within 10 seconds; that is GitHub’s deadline, not a universal webhook timeout. Its best-practices page discusses queueing work.
- Keep delivery records and a recovery procedure. Track outcomes, use provider redelivery facilities where available, and reconcile against the source API if missed events could corrupt important state. If you restrict GitHub traffic by source IP, fetch current ranges from its metadata endpoint and refresh them periodically because those addresses can change.
Choosing webhooks or the REST API: a practical checklist
- Does the provider emit every event your application needs?
- Can the provider reach a secure, publicly available HTTPS endpoint?
- Is a change useful only when it arrives quickly, or is scheduled freshness enough?
- Can your receiver validate signatures, persist delivery IDs, handle retries, and recover from downtime?
- Would polling at the needed cadence fit the API’s quotas and your number of monitored resources?
- Would periodic reconciliation reduce the risk of relying on delivery attempts alone?
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