Webhooks vs. Polling: Choosing the Right Approach

Every integration needs to detect changes in the source system. The two main approaches are webhooks (push) and polling (pull). Each has trade-offs that affect reliability, latency, and complexity.

Webhooks are event-driven: when something changes in HubSpot, it sends a notification to your integration immediately. This gives you near real-time updates with minimal API usage. But webhooks can be unreliable—if your endpoint is down when the webhook fires, you miss the event.

Polling means your integration periodically queries HubSpot for changes. It's more reliable because you control the timing and can retry failures. But it uses more API calls and introduces latency—changes aren't detected until the next poll cycle.

For most integrations, we recommend a hybrid approach. Use webhooks as the primary mechanism for real-time updates, but run periodic polling as a safety net to catch any events that webhooks might have missed.

The polling interval matters. Too frequent and you waste API calls; too infrequent and data gets stale. For most use cases, polling every 5-15 minutes strikes the right balance between freshness and efficiency.

HubSpot's webhook system has some quirks—events can arrive out of order, and there's no built-in guarantee of delivery. A robust integration needs to handle these edge cases gracefully.

RevOps Connect uses the hybrid approach by default, with configurable polling intervals and webhook processing that handles HubSpot's delivery quirks automatically.