When you need to know that something changed in another system, you either ask repeatedly (polling) or get told (webhooks). Each has a genuine place, and the common mistake is treating it as a permanent religious choice rather than picking per the constraints — or, better, combining them.
The trade-offs
| Webhooks | Polling | |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | Near-real-time | Bounded by poll interval |
| Load | Work only when events happen | Constant, mostly empty checks |
| Reliability | Delivery can be missed | You control retries; nothing is 'missed' |
| Setup | Public endpoint, signing, dedupe | A loop and a cursor |
| Control | Provider decides what and when | You decide when and what to fetch |
When webhooks win
Webhooks are the right default when latency matters and events are relatively infrequent — a payment succeeded, a build finished, a document was signed. You do work only when something actually happens, instead of asking "anything new?" thousands of times to catch a handful of changes. For real-time reactions at scale, polling simply cannot compete on efficiency.
When polling wins
Polling wins when you cannot expose a public endpoint, when the provider offers no webhooks, when you want full control over timing and back-pressure, or when changes are so frequent that a poll returns useful batches every time. It is also far simpler — a cursor and a loop, with no signature verification, no dedupe, no public attack surface — which for a low-stakes internal sync is a real advantage.
Webhooks give you speed but can drop an event; polling is slow but never misses. Serious integrations use webhooks for low-latency reaction and a periodic reconciliation poll as the backstop that catches anything the webhook missed. You get real-time behaviour and a guarantee of eventual consistency — the strengths of each covering the other's weakness.
Choose polling for simplicity, control, or when webhooks are not on offer; choose webhooks for low-latency, efficient reaction to sparse events. And when correctness genuinely matters, stop choosing: run webhooks for speed and a reconciliation poll for completeness, so a missed delivery becomes a slightly delayed update instead of lost data.
Independent software engineer in Nairobi specialising in Acumatica customisations, Laravel backends, and tax fiscalisation integrations across East and Southern Africa.