Webhooks vs polling decision guide

When building your integration with Payabli, you might wonder whether to use real-time webhook notifications or to poll API endpoints for status updates, reconciliation, and system integration. This guide helps you choose between using Payabli’s real-time webhook notifications or polling APIs based on your specific use case and requirements.

Decision trees

Use these interactive decision trees to walk through the best approach for handling notifications and status updates in your integration.

Payment notifications

This decision tree helps you determine the best approach for getting payment notifications and status updates from Payabli.

Merchant and application status

This decision tree helps you determine the best approach for getting boarding status updates from Payabli.

Recommended strategy by use case

Choose the right combination of webhooks and polling based on your needs. Here’s a quick reference to help you decide:

Webhooks

Webhooks are ideal when you need immediate, event-driven responses to payment activity. They provide the fastest way to update your systems and respond to customer actions. Use webhooks when:

• You want real-time updates for events such as marking invoices as paid, showing receipt screens.
• You’re processing autopays, external invoices, or embedded checkouts.
• You’re building event-driven systems. For example, when triggering next actions in a workflow.
• You need to notify customers immediately about payment status.
• You’re integrating with real-time analytics or monitoring systems.

Webhooks are reliable when:

• You respond to each event with proper HTTP response codes
• You support retries and implement idempotent event handling
• Your webhook endpoints have high uptime and fast response times
• You handle webhook authentication and validation properly

Core webhook events

Understanding which webhook events correspond to different payment flows helps you choose the right notifications for your integration.

Webhook best practices

Follow these best practices to build reliable webhook and polling implementations.

• Implement idempotent processing to handle duplicate events gracefully.
• Use proper HTTP status codes and return 200 statuses for successful processing.
• Set up retry mechanisms to handle temporary failures with exponential backoff.
• Validate webhook signatures to ensure events are from Payabli.
• Log all webhook events to maintain an audit trail for troubleshooting.

Polling

Polling provides reliable, predictable data access and is excellent for batch processing, reconciliation, and systems that don’t require immediate updates. Use polling when:

• You want to audit, reconcile, or backfill transaction data
• You need to recover from missed webhook events (server downtime, delivery failures)
• You’re building batch reports, dashboards, or analytics systems
• You prefer simpler implementation without webhook infrastructure
• You need historical data analysis or trend reporting

Core polling endpoints

Polling endpoints allow you to query transaction and payout data at your convenience. Here are the key endpoints:

• /Query/transactions - Query transactions by date range and filters
• /Invoice - Get invoice status and payment details
• /Payout/query - Check payout status and settlement information
• /MoneyIn/details/:transId - Get detailed transaction information
• /Boarding/read/:appid - Get application status and details

Polling best practices

Follow these best practices to build reliable polling implementations.

• Implement rate limiting to respect API rate limits and use appropriate intervals.
• Store last processed timestamps to track what data you’ve already processed.
• Use pagination to process large result sets efficiently.
• Use date range filters to minimize data transfer and processing overhead.
• Implement error handling to gracefully handle API errors and network issues.

Quick reference

This section provides quick links to relevant API endpoints, webhook events, and integration guides mentioned in the decision tree and throughout this guide.