Webhooks vs Polling: Choose the Right Integration Trigger

Webhooks notify your system when a provider emits an event; polling asks the provider for changes on a schedule. Neither approach eliminates reconciliation. Choose based on delivery behavior, acceptable delay, rate limits, and the source system's capabilities.

Understand the business timing

A daily reporting workflow may work well with scheduled polling. A user expecting an account update shortly after payment may need webhook-driven processing. Define an acceptable processing window before deciding that every integration must be real time.

Estimate polling volume. Checking an endpoint every minute means 1,440 checks per day even when nothing changes. That is an arithmetic estimate, not a vendor billing prediction; pagination and account count can multiply the actual requests.

Design webhook intake carefully

Verify authenticity using the provider's documented method. Validate the event, persist accepted work durably, and return a timely response. Move slow processing into a worker when the architecture supports it. An acknowledgement should mean you have accepted responsibility for the event, not merely printed it to a log.

Expect duplicates and potentially out-of-order delivery. Use stable identifiers and state rules that prevent an older event from overwriting newer information. A webhook is a notification to act or inspect state, not proof that its embedded snapshot is the latest version.

Make polling incremental

Store a durable cursor or checkpoint. Use stable pagination and an overlap window where necessary to avoid losing records updated at a boundary. Deduplicate records encountered twice. Only advance the checkpoint after the page's work is safely recorded.

For a source that supports only timestamps, consider records sharing the same update time and late-arriving changes. Document the limits of the strategy. A nightly full reconciliation may catch gaps that a short rolling window cannot.

Use both when reliability needs it

A practical pattern is webhooks for fast updates plus periodic reconciliation for missing outcomes. Keep both paths behind the same validation and deduplication logic so reconciliation does not create a second source of duplicates.

Test a disabled webhook endpoint, a repeated event, an empty polling page, and an interrupted pagination run. The system should catch up predictably and make delayed records visible. Select the simpler approach when its delivery delay meets the actual business requirement.

Further reading

Stripe's webhook guide describes its event delivery behavior. See pagination and checkpoints for a safe scheduled synchronization pattern.