Webhook vs Long Polling: Real-Time Trade-offs
Long polling has your client send a request that the server holds open until data is available (or a timeout hits), then the client immediately reconnects, which approximates real-time without webhooks. A webhook flips the direction entirely: the source pushes to your endpoint with no connection to hold open. Long polling avoids the need for a public endpoint but ties up connections and scales poorly; webhooks are the more efficient choice for backend-to-backend event delivery.
Webhooks vs long polling at a glance
| Webhooks | Long polling | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Source pushes to you | You hold a request open to the source |
| Open connections | None between events | One per waiting client |
| Latency | Near-instant | Near-instant while connected |
| Scaling cost | Grows with event volume | Grows with number of clients |
| Needs public endpoint | Yes | No |
When to use each
Use webhooks when you control a backend service that can receive inbound requests and want to avoid holding connections open.
Use long polling when the consumer cannot expose an endpoint (a browser or a locked-down client) and you still need near-real-time delivery without WebSockets.
How Hookdeck fits
Long polling keeps latency low by keeping your infrastructure busy waiting. Webhooks remove the waiting but hand you delivery concerns instead. Hookdeck absorbs those concerns: it holds a durable queue in front of your service, retries failed deliveries, and lets you replay any event, so a slow or down consumer never loses data. See the Event Gateway overview.
Related questions
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