Webhooks vs Polling

Two ways to stay current

Polling means your application asks a provider on a schedule — every minute, say — whether anything has changed. Webhooks invert that: the provider notifies you the moment something changes, with no question from you required. Both approaches keep your system in step with a source of truth, but they pay for that synchronisation in very different currencies.

With polling, you control the cadence and you own the connection that initiates each check. With webhooks, the provider controls the timing and you simply react to what arrives. Neither is universally better; the right choice depends on how often events occur, how quickly you need to know about them, and how much infrastructure you are willing to run to receive them. Understanding both lets you pick deliberately rather than by habit.

Latency and freshness

Polling introduces a delay equal to your interval. If you poll every five minutes, an event can sit unseen for nearly five minutes before your next check discovers it. Shorten the interval and you cut that latency, but you multiply the number of requests you make. Webhooks deliver close to real time, because the provider sends the notification the moment the event fires, with no polling gap at all.

If your use case is time-sensitive — a payment confirmation, a status that gates the very next step in a workflow — that freshness is genuinely valuable and hard to match with polling. But if a few minutes of staleness is harmless, the urgency argument for webhooks weakens considerably, and the operational simplicity of a scheduled poll starts to look attractive instead.

Cost and efficiency

Polling becomes wasteful when changes are rare. Imagine checking once a minute, all day, for an event that happens only twice — that is well over a thousand empty requests for two useful answers. Webhooks send traffic only when there is genuinely something to say, so they scale far more gracefully for sparse, bursty events that would otherwise drown you in fruitless polls.

The flip side is real, though. Webhooks demand a publicly reachable, always-available endpoint, plus signature verification and retry handling on top. Polling needs none of that — just a scheduled job and an API call you already know how to make. So you are trading running infrastructure and operational surface for request efficiency, and which trade wins depends on your event volume and your appetite for hosting.

Choosing — or combining

Reach for webhooks when events are infrequent, latency matters, and you can comfortably host an endpoint. Reach for polling when you cannot expose an endpoint at all, when you need a strictly ordered sweep of state, or when raw simplicity outweighs the latency cost. See the API documentation to confirm what each surface actually supports before you commit to one.

In practice, many of the most robust integrations use both. Webhooks provide prompt notification for the common case, while a periodic reconciliation poll acts as a safety net to catch anything a missed delivery quietly dropped. That belt-and-braces design — push for speed, pull for completeness — is covered further in replaying missed events, and it is well worth adopting.