When Is Polling Better Than Webhooks?

Polling is better than webhooks when you cannot expose a public endpoint, when the source does not offer webhooks, when you need to control the rate at which you pull data, or when you need to reconcile full state rather than react to individual events. Polling is pull-based, so it can always catch up after downtime by asking again, whereas a missed webhook is gone unless the sender retries.

Choose polling when

  • You cannot accept inbound traffic (a locked-down network, a client with no public URL).
  • The vendor exposes an API but no webhooks.
  • You need to throttle or batch how fast you ingest, independent of how fast events occur.
  • You need periodic full-state reconciliation, not a stream of deltas.
  • The data changes so constantly that a poll on a short interval is effectively real-time anyway.
  • You want the simplest possible integration at low volume and can tolerate the latency.

Choose webhooks when

Choose webhooks when events are irregular, latency matters, and you can receive an inbound request. In practice many production systems do both: webhooks for immediacy, a periodic poll as a reconciliation safety net to catch anything the webhook layer missed.

How Hookdeck fits

The strongest architectures pair push and pull, and the hard part of the push side is not receiving the request but guaranteeing you never silently drop one. Hookdeck gives webhooks the catch-up property that makes polling attractive: durable queuing, automatic retries, and replay of any historical event, so you get webhook latency with polling-grade recoverability. Start for free.

Webhook vs Long Polling Webhook vs REST API