What is a Polling vs. Webhooks?

Polling is simple to implement — call an endpoint every N seconds or minutes and compare the result to what you saw last time — but it trades off freshness against load: poll too infrequently and you're slow to notice changes, poll too frequently and you burn API rate limits and compute on mostly-empty checks. It also has no inherent way to know a change happened between polls beyond diffing full state, which gets expensive at scale. Webhooks flip the responsibility: the source system calls your endpoint the moment an event occurs, so you get near-instant notification with none of the wasted "nothing changed" checks. The cost is architectural: you need a publicly reachable, always-available endpoint, you must handle retries and duplicate deliveries (most webhook providers deliver at-least-once, not exactly-once), and verifying the request actually came from the claimed source (typically via a signed payload) is essential to avoid spoofed events. Many production integrations use both: webhooks for the common real-time path, with a periodic polling reconciliation pass as a safety net in case a webhook was missed or the endpoint was briefly down — belt-and-suspenders rather than picking one exclusively.