Webhooks vs Polling: Which Should You Use?

When you need to react to events in an external system (a payment completing, a file uploading, a build finishing) you have two options: poll for changes or receive webhooks when they happen.

Both work. The choice depends on your latency requirements, reliability needs, and how much operational complexity you are willing to take on.

How each approach works

Polling means asking repeatedly: "Has anything changed since I last checked?" You hit an API endpoint on a schedule (every second, every minute, every hour) and process anything new.

Webhooks are the reverse: the external system calls you the moment something happens. You do not ask; you are told.

The case for polling

Polling is often underrated. It is synchronous, stateless, and easy to reason about. You control when data is fetched. If your polling job fails, you can retry it. If the external API is down, you wait and try again. No webhook delivery infrastructure needed.

When polling works well:

• Latency does not matter: if you are syncing data nightly or hourly, polling is perfectly fine
• Low event volume: a few hundred updates per day does not justify webhook complexity
• The provider does not support webhooks: some APIs simply do not offer them
• You need full data consistency: polling lets you fetch the current state of everything rather than reconstructing it from an event stream
• Operational simplicity matters: polling is easier to test, debug, and reason about

// Simple polling loop with cursor-based pagination
async function syncNewOrders() {
  const lastChecked = await db.syncState.get('orders_last_checked');

  const orders = await shopify.orders.list({
    created_at_min: lastChecked,
    limit: 250,
  });

  for (const order of orders) {
    await processOrder(order);
  }

  await db.syncState.set('orders_last_checked', new Date().toISOString());
}

This is boring, reliable code. Nothing wrong with it.

The case for webhooks

Webhooks shine when you need to react quickly and at scale.

When webhooks are the right choice:

• Near-real-time latency is required: payment confirmations, fraud alerts, order status updates
• High event volume: polling 100,000 events per minute is expensive; receiving them is cheap
• You are paying per API call: polling at short intervals adds up fast
• The event contains data you need immediately: a webhook delivers the payload; polling requires a round trip to fetch it

A webhook can notify you of a payment in under a second. Even the most aggressive polling (every second) introduces up to 1 second of delay and burns API rate limits constantly.

A direct comparison

	Polling	Webhooks
Latency	Seconds to minutes	Milliseconds to seconds
API usage	High (constant requests)	Low (one request per event)
Implementation complexity	Low	Medium to high
Operational complexity	Low	Medium to high
Handles provider downtime	Naturally (retry on next poll)	Requires retry logic on their side
Handles your downtime	Catches up on next poll	Events may be lost or delayed
Works without public URL	Yes	No (or requires tunnelling)
Testability	Easy	Harder locally
Duplicate handling needed	Rarely	Yes (at-least-once delivery)

The hidden costs of webhooks

Webhooks look efficient on the surface (one HTTP call per event, no polling overhead) but they introduce operational complexity that polling does not have.

You need a public HTTPS endpoint. Polling works from inside a private network. Webhooks need to be reachable from the internet, which means public URLs, TLS certificates, and firewall rules.

You need to handle retries. Providers retry failed deliveries, but their retry window is finite. If your endpoint is down for longer than the provider's retry window, you lose events. You need to detect and recover from gaps.

Delivery is asynchronous and out of order. Events can arrive in any order. A payment.succeeded can arrive before the customer.created that set up the customer. Your handlers need to be resilient.

You need idempotency. Most webhook providers deliver "at least once", meaning the same event can arrive multiple times. Without deduplication, you can end up processing events twice.

Local development is awkward. You cannot receive webhooks on localhost without a tunnel or proxy.

None of these are blockers. They are just real costs that polling does not have.

Using both together

The pattern that works best in production is often a combination:

• Webhooks for real-time reactions - immediate response to events
• Polling as a catch-up mechanism - periodic reconciliation to catch anything missed

// Webhook handler - immediate, event-driven
async function handleStripePaymentSucceeded(event: Stripe.Event) {
  const paymentIntent = event.data.object as Stripe.PaymentIntent;
  await fulfillOrder(paymentIntent.metadata.orderId);
}

// Nightly reconciliation - catches anything missed
async function reconcilePayments() {
  const yesterday = new Date(Date.now() - 86_400_000).toISOString();

  const payments = await stripe.paymentIntents.list({
    created: { gte: Math.floor(new Date(yesterday).getTime() / 1000) },
    limit: 100,
  });

  for (const payment of payments.data) {
    if (payment.status === 'succeeded') {
      await fulfillOrderIfNotFulfilled(payment.metadata.orderId);
    }
  }
}

This gives you the speed of webhooks with the reliability of polling as a safety net.

When to choose each

Choose polling if:

• Events happen less than a few times per minute
• You can tolerate the latency of your polling interval
• You are early-stage and do not want to build webhook infrastructure yet
• The provider does not support webhooks

Choose webhooks if:

• You need sub-second or single-digit-second reaction times
• You are processing thousands of events per day or more
• You are being billed per API request
• The event data needs to be acted on immediately (payments, fraud, notifications)

Use both if:

• You need real-time reaction AND guaranteed eventual consistency
• The provider's retry window is short and your endpoint might be occasionally unavailable

Making webhooks easier to operate

The biggest practical barrier to webhooks is not the concept itself. It is the operational overhead. No visibility into what is arriving and what is failing. No easy way to replay missed events. Debugging failures means digging through provider dashboards and server logs simultaneously. Local development requires tunnels.

Webhook Watchtower sits in front of your endpoints, gives you a complete audit trail of every delivery, handles retries, and lets you replay anything that failed without changing your existing code.

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There is no universally right answer between webhooks and polling. Polling is underused for batch workloads where simplicity matters. Webhooks are unavoidable once you need real-time response at any volume. Most production systems end up using both.