Comparisons

Webhooks are a way for two applications to communicate with each other in real time. When an event happens in one application, a webhook is sent to the other application, which can then take some action based on the event.

Webhooks were created to solve the problem of polling. Before webhooks, applications would have to poll each other regularly to see if anything had changed. This was inefficient and could lead to missed events. Webhooks solve this problem by allowing applications to be notified of events as soon as they happen.

Webhooks were first implemented using HTTP POST requests. The application that wanted to be notified of events would provide a URL that the other application could POST to. When an event happened, the other application would POST a JSON payload to the URL.

Hook0 is a fully open-source project also available as an hosted service that makes it easy to set up and manage webhooks. With Hook0, you don't have to worry about the details of implementing webhooks, managing and scaling your own webhook servers.