Webhooks Explained – What are they & Which tools are best to create them?

As project needs evolve and expand, people need tools or software to enhance business operations and improve productivity. Over the past few years, several frameworks have been designed to aid the development of such tools and software, and among them webhooks are prominent ones.

Webhooks are essentially tools used to automate business processes and allow organizations to provide interactive capabilities to customers. With the increasing popularity of web apps, webhooks have become a necessity for organizations to reach customers on different platforms. This has made webhook development crucial for organizations.

Keeping all this in perspective, let’s try to dive deep into the background of webhooks and check out the top webhooks development tools.

What is webhook development?

A webhook is also called HTTP Push API or web callback. Unlike APIs which are triggered by requests, a webhook is triggered by an event.

Businesses launching marketing campaigns need technology that can initiate specific actions when a customer acts. For example, when a customer signs up for an email list, the webhook sends an automated mail to the customer which might also include discount codes as a welcome gift.

A webhook can be useful in various scenarios like updating an online store’s record for returning customers. For repeat customers, webhook can send discount codes and automated emails to customers.

Things to consider when selecting tools for webhook development

When you’re selecting tools for webhook development, you need to ensure they fulfill basic requirements like:

Security

The Internet is an open network and there are many risks to data traveling through unsecured channels. The tool you select should allow developers to encrypt data that is being transmitted over the internet. Without encryption, any person with advanced hacking capabilities can see the communication between your browser and server and know what you are sending and receiving. The development tools should offer enhanced security to webhook communication and ensure the endpoints between the sender and the receiver are encrypted.

Pass Secrets and Tokens

Webhook providers allow you to send tokens in every request. The token is generally passed as an HTTP header which is appended to the request URL. It is quite easy for people with technical knowledge of webhook to pass unauthorized tokens as requests, but that can jeopardize the entire communication. The tool you pick should therefore offer features to secure the process of passing tokens. For example, the platform should only accept requests. The developers should be able to insert functions that will check the digital certificate of the incoming request and validate it before processing.

Allow creation of whitelist of webhook providers’ IP addresses

If your application is operating behind a firewall, it may block many legitimate webhook requests. Hence, the platform you choose should allow the creation of a whitelist of webhook providers’ IP addresses that allows you to limit the endpoints that can send and receive requests.

Top 10 webhook development tools

1. Webhooks.io

Webhooks.io is a scalable SaaS solution built to ensure dependability and delivery of webhooks through a fast and reliable service. The Webhooks Proxy service allows you to proxy all your traffic through webhooks.io in less than 5 minutes, and gain insight and dependability on all your requests. Organizations can subscribe to one webhook and send it to one or more destinations. The proxy services allow customers to define custom retry policies for each destination and define linear and back-off policies for each destination.

Highlights:

• Allows you to make custom HTTP requests to the API to get more information and filter requests.
• Gives you complete event logs and payload details.
• Enables you to browse and filter webhooks from a single dashboard.
• Allows you to subscribe to multiple versions of the webhooks implementation.
• Lets you install full management consoles with three lines of code.
• Users can view HTTP responses, full logs, and details within the app.

The slight drawback with this tool is that basic subscriptions offer limited transformation recipes that can limit the functionality of the application for different users.

2. Hookdeck

Hookdeck is an infrastructure for the development and deployment of webhooks. It provides developers with all the tools needed to monitor and troubleshoot webhook events. The Hookdeck infrastructure offers stable and reliable data ingestions and supports the delivery of a large volume of webhooks. One of the important features of Hookdeck is that it offers a feature-packed platform for webhooks building, testing, deploying, and also allow monitoring of integrations at scale with reliability.

Highlights:

• Does the heavy lifting like queues, error handling, retries, and alerting.
• Gives you a platform and tools to develop webhooks locally and collect a replayable history of all webhooks.
• Makes webhooks integration fast. No more provisioning infrastructure or code changes.
• Keeps a record of every webhook and delivery attempt.
• Gives you complete visibility over metadata and event data that makes the debugging and troubleshooting easy.

You should know that this tool’s free account provides only 24-hour retention for webhooks.

3. Webhook Relay

Webhook Relay is a cloud-based solution that offers multiple integrations through which agents and users can receive webhooks on any internal and external destinations. It also allows companies to distribute webhooks across multiple services to create external handlers for server events. The bidirectional tunnel feature allows users to access web services from private networks connect IoT devices and demonstrate websites (hook a website to HTTP requests). Webhook Relay offers serverless functions that can be hosted on managed infrastructure to request third-party services or transform the webhook payloads.

Highlights:

• It allows users to expose web services and receive, transform webhooks without configuring NAT/Firewall in a secure way.
• The platform allows users to manage webhooks without public IP.
• Can forward webhooks to multiple destinations to get different outputs.

4. Gowebhook

Gowebhook is a fully-featured webhooks delivery platform that allows you to build and deploy webhooks with great ease. The platform provides you with necessary engineering resources to build webhooks with Stripe. When you use Gowebhook, you don’t have to worry about security protocols while deploying since the platform takes care of it. The platform notifies the clients of failing endpoints and disables the ones that are creating unnecessary load on the system.

Highlights:

• An internal dashboard allows you to track every webhook delivery, status, and failure.
• The admin dashboard comes with built-in analytics, logs, and reporting that make webhook management easy for you.
• You can customize your retries schedule or allow the Gowebhook platform algorithm to do it for you.
• Offers idempotency guarantee that allows the clients to make the same call (through webhook) repeatedly while producing the same result.

While it offers quite a few benefits, the tool limits your choice as far as payment gateways go. You can only use the Stripe payment gateway.

5. Request Bin by Pipedream

The Request Bin is a great tool to test your HTTP requests format. It can help you visualize your HTTP request even in the absence of a network inspect console which is needed when building Adobe XD and Sketch plugins. The tool can collect webhook and HTTP requests from popular apps and inspect each event with REST or SSE APIs. With the Request Bin tool, you can create HTTP requests for any app including Google Drive, Google Calendar, Dropbox, JotForm, and many more. The HTTP endpoints created using Request Bon do not expire. It gives you the option to delete events or bins from the platform itself. Here are some pros and cons of Request Bin.

Highlights:

• Allows you to inspect HTTP payloads up to 512k.
• Enables you to send multi-party payloads with files up to 5TB.
• Create and manage events and bins via CLI or API.

The tool doesn’t provide any proxy feature to deploy webhooks or HTTP requests.

6. WebhookInbox

WebhookInbox is an open-source web service built with popular web technologies like Django, Redis, Pushpin, and AngularJS. It receives HTTP requests from external sources and stores their data on the server for later retrieval. Each inbox is identified by a generated URL that can be passed to other applications for specific purposes. This is a useful service for companies that make HTTP callbacks. WebhookInbox provides you an easy way to examine what you are sending and the incoming request data is displayed on the tool’s interface in real-time.

Highlights:

• It offers REST API which allows developers to use it programmatically like a browser app wanting to receive HTTP Callbacks.
• The URL generated by WebhookInbox works with PubSubHubbub. It means you can create an inbox and subscribe the inbox URL to a PubSubHubbub service and it will deliver feed updates to your inbox.

7. Ngrok

Ngrok is a tunneling tool for localhost webhook development. It can create a secure introspectable tool to manage webhooks and also help in debugging. Ngrok can help you connect to local servers behind NAT, and firewalls to the public Internet over secure tunnels. It provides a web server to the client which is connected to Ngrok cloud service that accepts traffic on a public address. Ngrok can be used to build webhook consumers on your dev. machine.

Highlights:

• It allows you to create HTTPS URLs easily and offload TLS (transport layer security) without worrying about configuration.
• Lets you set authentication for HTTP tunnels and adds OAuth (open authorization) which enables third-party services to exchange information without giving passwords.
• It used the upgraded version HTTP/2 that allows tunneled services to load fast.
• It doesn’t require the user to forward ports even when the device changes network.

Probably the most annoying thing about Ngrok is that its connection speed depends on user’s Internet speed, which can often be very slow. Also, the HTTP URL created in the free version of the tool is automatically closed in 8 hours.

8. Hookbin

Hookbin is a free service that allows you to capture and inspect HTTP requests. With this service, you can create endpoints for cookies, inspect headers, query strings, upload files and body, and do much more. It allows you to create private endpoints, which is a read-only network interface for the lifecycle of the resource.

Highlights:

• It supports multiple content types like YAML, XML, JSON, Multipart, and URL encoded requests.
• It secures all endpoints with 2048-bit SSL certificates.
• It supports one-click uploads; it means you can upload, parse, and download your HTTP endpoints with few clicks.

The biggest drawback of the tool is that the private endpoints created with it are only visible in your browser.

9. Webhook.site

Webhook.site is a unique website that allows you to test and debug webhook and HTTP requests. It features a Custom Actions graphical editor that allows developers to create their workflows. WebhookScript is a scripting language used to transform, validate, and process HTTP requests. With this tool, you can connect different APIs that aren’t compatible and instantly build APIs without needing any infrastructure. Developers can also build contact forms with webhook that can send emails.

Highlights:

• It doesn’t need an internet-facing web server to receive webhook.
• It allows you to send webhook to a server on a private subnet or behind a firewall.
• It enables you to transform webhook into other formats and re-send them to different systems.

Among the shortcomings of this tool is the fact that its open source version doesn’t include Custom Actions. Moreover, some features of the cloud version of Webhook.site are available only to paying customers.

10. Httpie

Httpie is a command line HTTP client that allows you to seamlessly interact with APIs. The platform allows you to organize your API library and can seamlessly go back to any of your requests in history. Httpie allows you to navigate between the app and CLI and enables developers to build and preview requests without sending them. The app allows you to work locally in a distraction free environment.

Highlights:

• It offers a powerful command-line HTTP and API client.
• The platform makes testing and debugging of APIs relatively painless.
• It offers support for HTTPS, proxies, and authentication support.

Wrapping Up

Today, we see increased use of apps by end-users, employees, and stakeholders to buy products and services, and even for communication. Apps are convenient for both businesses and customers, but their usefulness becomes limited when they function as standalone utilities. This is why businesses need to open their systems for integration to allow users to enjoy extended functionality. Such an approach also helps businesses retain their customer base. Webhooks allow apps to communicate and exchange data and provide a seamless user experience to the user. Webhook development tools take the stress out of programming Internet services and give businesses an edge over the competition.