When your SaaS product connects to the third-party tools your customers already use, such as a CRM, a calendar, or a ticketing system, enterprise deals often require that data move between the two within seconds. If a deal closes in HubSpot, the customer expects your product to reflect it before the next polling cycle runs. Polling every API on a tight schedule is slow and expensive at scale. Webhooks reduce that delay and cost, but they can arrive late, more than once, or not at all.
Webhook infrastructure needs to cover receiving events from third-party APIs and sending events to your customers. Each problem requires a different kind of tool.
TL;DR
Top webhook infrastructure picks for 2026:
- Nango: Best for receiving third-party API webhooks, with provider-specific subscription functions, verification, connection attribution, and polling fallback within a broader catalog of 900+ APIs.
- Hookdeck: Best for high-volume ingestion of events that already reach a webhook URL, with 160+ pre-configured sources, durable queueing, and replay.
- Svix: Best webhooks-as-a-service platform for sending webhooks to your customers; it co-created the Standard Webhooks specification.
Receiving vs. sending: which webhook problem do you have?
Receiving webhooks (inbound) is part of the API integration layer. Your product accepts events from external providers, and each provider defines its own subscription, verification, and delivery rules.
For example, HubSpot configures webhook subscriptions at the app level, so one configuration applies to every customer who installs your app. Google Calendar push-notification channels expire after seven days by default, and you must create a replacement before each one expires. Salesforce’s core REST API exposes no generic record-change webhook, so teams use Change Data Capture, Platform Events, or outbound messaging instead.
Verification also varies by provider. Many providers sign payloads with an HMAC (hash-based message authentication code) secret, but their headers, hash algorithms, and timestamp rules differ. Some use a challenge-response handshake to verify that you control the endpoint. Others provide no cryptographic signature.
A multi-tenant SaaS must then attribute each event to the correct customer connection and handle events that arrive late, more than once, out of order, or not at all. Production systems often pair webhooks with low-frequency polling to reconcile missed changes.
Sending webhooks (outbound) reverses the direction. Your product generates an event and delivers it to endpoints registered by your customers. The delivery layer must fan out events, sign requests, retry failures, and record each attempt. A customer portal lets users register endpoints, manage signing secrets, inspect attempts, and replay failed events. Svix is designed for this model. Outbound services start after your application generates an event, so they do not manage provider subscriptions or attribute incoming events to customer connections.
For a broader view of integration platforms, see best embedded iPaaS platforms for product integrations.
How we evaluated webhook infrastructure tools
At Nango, we work with hundreds of teams that run product integrations in production. We drew these criteria from their incidents and platform evaluations, then tested each product against them with a free account and checked every claim against its official documentation.
- Delivery reliability: Webhooks can be dropped, duplicated, or delivered out of order. For one CRM-data team, the resulting gaps in synced data became a critical incident. We compared each platform’s retries, delivery semantics, deduplication, and ordering guarantees.
- Burst handling and backpressure: One team’s Attio integration generated bursts that pushed monthly egress costs into tens of thousands of dollars, so events had to be queued and processed in 15 to 30-minute batches. Another team lost a customer to GoHighLevel webhook-processing bottlenecks. We looked at queueing, throttling, and per-integration controls.
- Subscription lifecycle management: We checked whether each platform can register, renew, and remove provider webhook subscriptions, including for providers that require one per connected account. Delivery-focused platforms leave this to your team.
- Verification and security: Providers use different signature and endpoint-verification schemes. We checked for provider-specific verification, replay protection, and controls that keep payloads out of logs.
- Multi-tenant attribution: Every incoming event must be mapped to the correct customer connection. We checked whether each platform does this itself or leaves the routing to your team.
- Polling fallback and reconciliation: The production pattern we recommend pairs webhooks for low latency with periodic polling to catch missed events. Several teams cut compute costs by replacing 30-second polling with webhooks and hourly reconciliation. We checked which platforms can poll the provider’s API, since the same pattern underpins reliable two-way data syncs.
- Observability and recovery: Teams have cited unclear error messages as a reason for switching platforms. We looked for searchable event logs, replay, alerting, and OpenTelemetry export.
- Deployment and compliance: Self-hosting, BYOC, and data residency can decide deals. One prospect made self-hosted webhook forwarding a deciding requirement. We checked each vendor’s deployment options and its SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA status. For a deeper review, see top AI agent integration tools for compliance.
- Direction coverage: We recorded whether each platform receives webhooks, sends them, or supports both directions.
Best webhook infrastructure and management tools
Nango comes first as our top pick for the inbound use case.
1. Nango
Overview
Nango gives each external API one integration-specific webhook URL and attributes incoming events to the right customer connection. Receiving webhooks from external APIs is one of its core use cases. Nango is a platform for building product integrations as code with coding agents, and its cloud runtime handles authentication, data syncs, tool calls, and webhook processing across a catalog of 900+ APIs. Hundreds of teams use Nango to run product integrations in production.
Best for
Teams that need to receive third-party API webhooks and manage provider subscriptions, connection attribution, code-based processing, and polling reconciliation.
Pros
-
Provider-side webhook orchestration: Each integration gets a dedicated Nango webhook URL. Webhook support and setup vary by provider within the broader 900+ API catalog. When a provider requires a separate subscription per connected account, event functions can register it after connection creation and remove it before deletion. Scheduled sync functions can renew subscriptions that expire, such as Google Calendar channels.When an event arrives, Nango maps it to the correct customer connection if the payload contains the required identifiers, verifies supported provider signatures when the secret is configured, and records the event in its logs. Real-time syncs combine webhook processing with polling-based reconciliation, and the
ignore_if_modified_aftermerging strategy stops older polled data from overwriting newer webhook updates. - Enterprise-ready and built for scale: Nango handles billions of API requests each month. Webhook and function runs produce detailed logs. Nango can also export webhook, sync, action, and proxy executions as OpenTelemetry traces.Nango is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant, with a BAA available. Enterprise customers can deploy through BYOC in their own cloud account and region, including the EU, or self-host the Enterprise edition with the same features as Nango Cloud.
- Code and developer first: Webhook logic lives in your repository as code functions. You can forward provider events to your application or process them in a webhook function that updates synced records. Nango signs forwarded events and retries failed deliveries to your endpoint. The Nango skill lets Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex write and test this logic against a real connection, and the Salesforce webhook guide walks from subscription registration to event processing. Nango is open source.
Cons
- Not a customer-facing webhook delivery service: Nango sends signed webhook notifications to your application, but it provides no customer-facing fan-out or endpoint portal. Pair it with an outbound platform such as Svix when your customers need to manage their own endpoints.
2. Hookdeck
Overview
Hookdeck Event Gateway sits between webhook providers and your application. You create a source per provider and add its Hookdeck URL to the provider’s webhook settings. Hookdeck then verifies supported signatures, applies your filters, queues the event, and delivers it to your endpoint with retries. For outbound delivery, Hookdeck offers a separate Apache 2.0 product called Outpost, also available as a managed service.
Best for
Teams that already manage provider subscriptions but need reliable, high-volume webhook ingestion with spike protection, durable queueing, and replay in front of their handlers.
Pros
- 160+ pre-configured sources: Hookdeck provides built-in verification for providers such as Stripe, Shopify, GitHub, and Slack. Generic sources support HMAC, basic authentication, and API key checks.
- Delivery controls: Hookdeck provides at-least-once delivery, configurable retries, and best-effort deduplication. When a destination reaches its configured rate limit, Hookdeck queues additional events instead of dropping them, provided they remain within the plan’s retention window.
- Debugging and monitoring: Full request logs and event tracing show how each event moved through the pipeline. Hookdeck exports metrics to Datadog and Prometheus, and its CLI forwards events to a local development server.
Cons
- Starts after the webhook arrives: Hookdeck does not register or renew provider subscriptions, or poll APIs without webhook support. Your team owns that provider-side lifecycle.
- No automatic customer attribution: Hookdeck does not know how your application models customers, so you must build the routing that maps each event to the correct customer connection.
- Limited retention and US-only hosting: Plans below Growth retain events for three or seven days, and the managed Event Gateway offers no EU data residency.
3. Svix
Overview
Svix is a webhooks-as-a-service platform for the outbound problem: delivering webhooks from your product to endpoints managed by your customers. Its main product, Svix Dispatch, handles fan-out, signing, retries, replay, and endpoint management. Svix also helped create the Standard Webhooks specification.
The core Svix server is open source under the MIT license.
Best for
Teams that need to send webhooks to their customers with reliable retries, ordered delivery, replay, and an embeddable endpoint-management portal.
Pros
- Outbound delivery controls: Svix retries failed deliveries with exponential backoff over roughly 28 hours, preserves order on FIFO endpoints, replays events in bulk, and automatically disables endpoints that keep failing.
- Customer-facing portal: An embeddable portal lets customers register endpoints, inspect delivery attempts, and investigate failures without contacting your support team.
- Compliance and residency: Svix is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant. It offers data residency in the US, EU, Australia, Canada, and India.
Cons
- Provider-side orchestration remains yours: Svix Ingest, a separate product from Dispatch, receives webhooks from external providers, verifies supported signatures, and forwards them to your application. It does not register provider subscriptions, attribute events to customer connections, or poll provider APIs for missed changes. Its Polling Endpoint lets your application poll events stored in Svix, not the external provider.
4. Convoy
Overview
Convoy is a webhook gateway written in Go that supports both inbound ingestion from external providers and outbound delivery to customer endpoints. It moved to Elastic License 2.0 in September 2024 and follows an open-core model, with some features unlocked only by a paid licence key.
Best for
Teams that want to self-host one webhook gateway for both inbound and outbound delivery.
Pros
- Both directions in one gateway: Outgoing projects support fan-out, retries, rate limiting, and idempotency keys. Incoming projects verify requests with HMAC signatures, basic authentication, or API keys before routing events to your app.
- Straightforward self-hosting: Convoy runs as a Go binary with PostgreSQL and Redis, deployable with Docker or Kubernetes. The project was actively maintained as of August 2026.
Cons
- Limits in the community edition: The community edition supports one user, one organization, and two projects. Customer portals, Prometheus metrics, retention policies, and RBAC require a paid licence.
- No provider-side orchestration: Convoy does not manage provider subscriptions, poll provider APIs for missed changes, or map incoming events to customer connections. You configure its incoming URL with each provider and build the routing yourself.
5. Hook0
Overview
Hook0 is an open-source webhooks-as-a-service platform for outbound delivery, written in Rust and licensed under the SSPL. Its managed webhook data plane runs in France, inside the EU, and it can also be self-hosted.
Best for
European teams that need customer-facing webhook delivery through an EU-hosted cloud service or a self-hosted deployment.
Pros
- Full feature parity when self-hosted: Hook0 provides the same feature set in its self-hosted and managed cloud versions.
- Core outbound delivery features: Hook0 supports event-type subscriptions, automatic retries, HMAC-SHA-256 signatures, delivery logs, event replay, and a subscriber portal.
Cons
- Outbound only: Hook0 sends webhooks to customer endpoints but does not receive events from third-party providers. Your team must manage the provider-side integration separately.
- No Hook0 SOC 2 attestation: Hook0 is GDPR-ready and provides a DPA. Its hosting provider holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications, but those do not cover Hook0 itself.
- Limited self-serve retention: Hook0’s self-serve cloud plans include no more than 30 days of event history.
Webhook testing tools
During development, simpler tools help you inspect payloads and route events to a local server. webhook.site provides a temporary public URL and displays every request it receives. ngrok exposes your local server through a public tunnel, and Webhook Relay forwards events to localhost or a private network through its relay agent. Both also offer production gateway features, but none of these tools manages provider subscriptions, customer-connection attribution, or polling fallback.
Comparison of webhook infrastructure tools
| Criterion | Nango | Hookdeck | Svix | Convoy | Hook0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direction | Receive | Both (receive first) | Both (send first) | Both | Send |
| Provider subscription management | Via provider-specific functions | No | No | No | No |
| Multi-tenant connection attribution | When routable | Manual | Manual | Manual | n/a |
| Polling fallback | Yes (syncs) | No | No | No | No |
| Queueing and replay | Forwarding retries + polling reconciliation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Retries + replay |
| Self-host | Enterprise edition (full parity) | Outpost only | Core server (MIT) | Yes (open core) | Yes (full parity) |
| Compliance | SOC 2 II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA) | SOC 2 II, GDPR, HIPAA | SOC 2 II, GDPR, HIPAA | SOC 2 Type I, GDPR; HIPAA not publicly claimed | GDPR; no Hook0 SOC 2 attestation; HIPAA not publicly claimed |
| Pricing model | Tiers + usage | Tiers + per event | Tiers + per message | Flat plans + caps | Tiers + per event |
How we applied the criteria
Each cell records what the vendor’s documentation states. Where documentation and marketing pages disagreed, we followed the documentation.
- “When routable” means Nango attributes an event to a customer connection when the payload identifies it. “Manual” means your team builds that routing.
- Queueing and replay: Nango does not replay stored payloads. It retries forwarded events and reconciles missed changes by polling the provider’s API.
- “Full parity” means the self-hosted version includes every feature of the managed service.
- “Not publicly claimed” means we found no statement on the vendor’s site, not that the vendor is non-compliant.
FAQ: webhook infrastructure for SaaS integrations
What is the best webhook ingestion platform for SaaS apps?
Nango is the best webhook ingestion platform for SaaS apps that receive events from third-party APIs. A gateway such as Hookdeck starts after the provider sends an event to its public URL, so your team still owns each provider’s subscription and API-specific logic. Nango, by contrast, provides an integration-specific webhook URL and routes events when the payload identifies the relevant customer connection. Lifecycle functions run your registration and cleanup code. Periodic syncs reconcile missed events. If your problem is sending webhooks to your own customers instead, Svix is the better fit.
How do I receive webhooks from APIs that don’t support them?
You cannot receive a webhook from a provider that does not send one. Instead, poll its API on a schedule and persist a cursor or watermark between runs. With Nango, a sync polls at the frequency you define, writes changed records to its cache, and can notify your application after each run. This gives you change notifications without the provider’s original event semantics.
Webhooks vs. WebSockets vs. polling: when should I use which?
Use webhooks when the provider supports them and updates within seconds are fast enough. Use polling when the provider offers no webhooks or you need to reconcile missed changes. Use WebSockets when both systems must exchange low-latency messages over a persistent connection, which few SaaS APIs offer for integration events.
What is a webhook endpoint?
A webhook endpoint is a URL that your application exposes to receive event requests from a provider. In production, it should verify the provider’s signature when one is available, return a 2xx response quickly, and process the payload asynchronously. It should also handle duplicate and out-of-order events safely.
Svix vs. Hookdeck: which one do I actually need?
It depends on the direction of the events. Svix Dispatch sends webhooks from your product to your customers. Hookdeck receives webhooks from providers you have already configured to send events to its source URL. Neither manages provider subscriptions or polling fallback. If you need to receive events from many third-party APIs, Nango is a better fit.
Are there open-source webhook tools I can self-host?
Yes, though most self-hostable webhook services cover outbound delivery only. Convoy uses Elastic License 2.0, with some features behind a paid licence. Hook0 uses the SSPL with full parity between cloud and self-hosted. The Svix core server is MIT licensed, and Hookdeck Outpost is Apache 2.0 for outbound delivery. Nango is open source under Elastic License 2.0, and its Enterprise edition self-hosts with the same features as Nango Cloud.
How do I test webhooks locally?
Use ngrok to expose your local server through a public URL so providers can send events straight to your handler. Use webhook.site to inspect a provider’s real headers and payload before writing the handler. With Nango, coding agents can use the Nango skill to write and test webhook functions against a real connection.
Conclusion
Most webhook platforms begin after an endpoint or provider subscription exists. Third-party API webhooks require more than reliable delivery. Your integration may need to register and renew subscriptions, verify provider-specific signatures, attribute events to customer connections, and poll for missed changes. Nango supports this lifecycle alongside authentication and data syncs across 900+ APIs, and its code-based model lets coding agents help write and test the provider-specific logic. For SaaS products that integrate with many external APIs, Nango is our top pick.
Evaluate each platform against the failures you expect in production: an expiring subscription, a traffic burst, a missed event, and a provider with no webhook support.
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