How ngrok Makes Local Webhook Testing Safe and Instant

It's 2 AM, 2017. You're trying to test a Stripe webhook against your local development server.

Here's your setup: your laptop is behind a corporate VPN that blocks inbound connections, your router is behind NAT, and Stripe's webhook delivery requires a publicly reachable URL. So you try SSH tunneling to a $5 DigitalOcean droplet — that mostly works, except your SSH config resets when the VPN kicks you out, which it does every forty minutes. You try configuring port forwarding on the router. The router's admin panel says it saved. The webhooks still don't arrive.

Eventually you give up, comment out the signature verification, hard-code a test payload at the top of your handler, and test it that way. You leave a comment: // FIXME before deploy.

The FIXME goes to production.

ngrok ended this. One command — ngrok http 3000 — and Stripe can hit your laptop. It was a genuinely transformative developer tool, and the industry owes it real credit.

What ngrok Does Brilliantly

The tunnel itself is just the beginning. What made ngrok indispensable for webhook development is what sits on top of it: Traffic Inspector.

Open http://localhost:4040 while your ngrok tunnel is running and you get a real-time request viewer. Every incoming request shows up immediately — full headers, full body, response code, response headers, response body, and latency. You can see exactly what Stripe sent, exactly how your handler responded, and whether there's a mismatch. The ngrok documentation covers all Traffic Inspector features in detail.

The interface is clean, fast, and immediately useful. You can filter by method, status, or path. You can expand any request and see it formatted as JSON. You can click Replay on any captured request and re-fire it at your handler without going back to the Stripe dashboard and hunting for the test event button.

The webhook verification tab is a legitimately clever feature: paste in your webhook signing secret and ngrok will verify the HMAC signature on each incoming request and show you a clear pass/fail. This surfaces signature problems immediately — wrong secret, body already parsed, content-type mismatch — before you've written a single line of verification code. For more on that flow, see how to test Stripe webhooks locally.

The assigned free dev domain is another smart move. Instead of a random URL that changes every tunnel restart, ngrok can assign you a stable subdomain on ngrok.io at no cost. You configure Stripe once, and the URL keeps working across restarts. This alone saves the "update every provider, every morning" scramble that plagued early ngrok users.

ngrok Traffic Inspector, replay, assigned domains, and signature verification: these are good engineering decisions, thoughtfully implemented. If your problem is local webhook development, ngrok is genuinely excellent at solving it.

Now Let's Be Honest About the Edges

Local dev is where ngrok shines. Production webhook management is a different problem — and that's where a tool like webhooks.io starts to look more relevant.

webhooks.io is built specifically for production webhook operations. Its standout capability: configurable retry policies. When a webhook delivery fails — your server is down, your handler returns a 500, the database is momentarily unavailable — webhooks.io lets you define exactly how retries should behave. No retries, linear backoff, or exponential backoff with configurable intervals. You pick the retry curve that matches your SLAs. Webhook retry storms are a real production risk; webhooks.io gives you control over that curve.

This matters in production because webhook retry behavior from providers is often opaque and unpredictable. Some providers retry 24 times over 72 hours. Some stop after 5 attempts. Some retry at fixed intervals. webhooks.io puts you back in control of that behavior on your side. If your handler fails at 3 PM on a Tuesday, you can configure exactly how aggressively webhooks.io attempts redelivery, rather than depending on the provider's retry schedule.

webhooks.io also lets you manually resend any recorded event — important for incident recovery when you need to reprocess a batch of failed events. The tool is built for the production operations use case: ongoing reliability, audit logging, retry management.

ngrok's Traffic Inspector records history for the current tunnel session. When the tunnel closes, that history is gone. That's fine for development. It's a gap in production.

Where HookTunnel Comes In

HookTunnel took the ngrok insight — stable URL, configure your provider once, never touch it again — and built it for persistent capture rather than local tunneling.

Every hook URL at HookTunnel (hooks.hooktunnel.com/h/your-id) is permanent. Not "stable for this session." Permanent. You configure it in Stripe on Monday and the URL is still working on Friday, after a weekend away, after a laptop restart, after you upgrade your dev environment. The URL is a first-class artifact, not a tunnel artifact.

History persists across everything. Events that arrived while you were offline, while your server was down, while you were on vacation — they're all there, in full, queryable, sortable. ngrok's Traffic Inspector shows you the current session. HookTunnel shows you the last 24 hours on the free tier, 30 days on Pro. This is the key distinction when dealing with silent webhook failures — the event may have arrived while you weren't watching.

The replay functionality in HookTunnel's Pro tier ($19/month) is direct competition with both ngrok's one-click replay and webhooks.io's manual resend. Replay any captured event to any target URL — including localhost, your staging server, or a production URL. From the dashboard or from the CLI. Replay a batch of events from a time range. Useful for incident recovery ("replay everything from 2 PM yesterday to midnight") or for local development against real production payloads.

At $0 for the free tier, you get a permanent capture URL, full payload history, and the dashboard. No tunnel configuration needed. No ngrok client to install.

The Comparison

| | ngrok | webhooks.io | HookTunnel | |---|---|---|---| | Best for | Local dev tunneling | Production retry management | Payload capture + history + replay | | URL stability | Assigned free domain (stable), paid custom domains | Production endpoint | Permanent by default (free) | | History persistence | Current session only | Yes | 24h free, 30d Pro | | Replay capability | One-click in Traffic Inspector | Manual resend | Any target URL, free tier capture / Pro replay | | Retry policies | None (routes to your server) | Configurable (none/linear/exponential) | Not a retry manager | | Pricing | Free tier, paid plans for custom domains | Paid plans | $0 free, $19/mo Pro | | Signature verification | Yes (Traffic Inspector tab) | Depends on integration | Not built-in (use your provider's tools) | | Offline capture | No (tunnel must be running) | Yes | Yes |

Picking the Right Tool for the Right Job

ngrok's Traffic Inspector is excellent for what it is: a real-time development tool that shows you the exact HTTP conversation between your provider and your handler. If you're writing a Stripe integration for the first time and want to see the exact payload shape, verify your signature code, and rapidly iterate — ngrok is the right choice. Fast, clear, and the replay in Traffic Inspector is genuinely useful. See our webhook debugging guide for a structured approach to using these tools together.

webhooks.io is the right choice when you need production retry management. When you want to own the retry curve, when you need to audit all deliveries, when manual resend for incident recovery is a core workflow.

HookTunnel is the right choice when you want the stable URL that ngrok established as a baseline — plus payload history that survives everything, plus the ability to replay captured events to any target. The dev-to-production continuity play: the same URL you used for development is the same URL your integration is configured against forever.

All three tools are doing something real. ngrok changed how developers approach local webhook testing, and it deserves that credit. webhooks.io built the production operations layer that ngrok was never designed to be. And now there's a new dog in the neighborhood — one that brought persistent history and Pro replay to the stable-URL foundation ngrok invented.

Start with a free hook URL → No install required. No credit card. Permanent URL from minute one.