webhooks.io Has 2 G2 Reviews — What Low Social Proof Means When Evaluating Webhook Reliability

Every webhook tool is trying to solve a version of the same problem. You have a provider — Stripe, Shopify, Twilio, GitHub — sending HTTP POST requests to an endpoint you control. That endpoint needs to be stable, the payloads need to be captured, and when something goes wrong — handler failure, missed event, bad deployment window — you need enough history and replay capability to recover.

The problem sounds simple. The implementation is not. Providers have their own retry policies. History retention requires storage and indexing. Replay introduces questions about idempotency and target routing. Authentication, signing secrets, and per-hook rate limiting add surface area. Teams that try to build all of this natively discover, usually during an incident, that they agreed to maintain a webhook infrastructure layer in addition to their actual product.

Managed webhook tools exist to absorb that complexity. webhooks.io is one of them. It offers a proxy layer, retry handling, and tiered throughput and retention. The question this post addresses is not whether webhooks.io can help — it can — but how to evaluate it responsibly when the public evidence is thin. For the full vendor evaluation framework, see the webhook vendor evaluation checklist. See the G2 reviews for webhooks.io for the current public review corpus and webhooks.io documentation for the current product feature surface.

What webhooks.io offers

webhooks.io reduces the "build a proxy" problem. Instead of routing provider webhooks directly to your application and managing all the associated infrastructure yourself, you route them through webhooks.io. The service handles the stable URL, captures the payload, applies retry logic on delivery failures, and provides a dashboard for inspection.

The Developer plan documentation lists 10 requests per second throughput and seven days of retention, with per-request overages above plan limits. Higher tiers extend retention and throughput capacity.

This is a real offering that addresses a real need. Teams that have spent engineering cycles building and maintaining their own webhook proxy infrastructure know the cost of doing it natively. A managed layer that handles the proxy work, provides a UI for inspection, and maintains some history is a legitimate alternative to that internal build. That value is not in dispute.

The question, before you commit to any managed service for a piece of your critical infrastructure, is how much evidence exists about whether it delivers that value reliably.

The review volume problem

G2 currently shows two reviews for webhooks.io. G2 itself surfaces a caution alongside the listing: there are "not enough reviews to provide buying insight." Two reviews cannot distinguish between a small satisfied customer base and a narrow user base with real problems — it's a data volume problem, not a quality verdict.

Two reviews is not a verdict about product quality. It is a data volume problem. A tool with two reviews could be excellent — widely adopted by enterprise buyers who do not write public reviews, or by developers who chose GitHub stars and community Slack channels over G2 submissions. Two reviews could also indicate a narrower user base with limited public conversation. The point is that two reviews cannot distinguish between these interpretations.

What two reviews does mean, concretely, is that your evaluation has less signal to work with. When a tool has four hundred G2 reviews, you can look for patterns across the distribution — what do the most negative reviews consistently flag? What do the three-star reviews say that the five-star reviews don't? What do reviewers in your industry vertical notice? With two reviews, none of that statistical pattern-finding is available. You are reading the whole dataset at once, and the whole dataset is two people.

For infrastructure-adjacent tools — and webhook handling sits close to infrastructure — low review volume warrants additional diligence, not a rejection, but more research before a commitment.

What those two reviews surface

One reviewer, writing on August 29, 2024, noted three things worth holding:

First, that webhooks.io is "a bit complex to set up." Complexity during initial setup is not uncommon with proxy-layer tools. But it is worth understanding what is driving the complexity — is it documentation gaps, API design choices, or necessary configuration depth? That distinction affects whether the complexity is a one-time setup cost or an ongoing maintenance burden.

Second, the same reviewer observed that "when it is slow, the operations failed." This is the most operationally significant observation in the two-review corpus. A webhook proxy layer that fails operations when it experiences latency introduces a coupling between the proxy's performance and your application's reliability. Whether that failure mode is an edge case or a common pattern is not determinable from a single data point — but it is a question worth asking directly before committing.

Third, the reviewer noted that webhooks.io felt on the "lower side… when comes to security." This is a vague observation without specifics, but it is also the kind of note that surfaces real concern. Webhook security — signing secret validation, HTTPS enforcement, credential rotation, audit logging of delivery attempts — is not optional for production systems. What the reviewer meant by "lower side" is worth clarifying through documentation review or a direct support inquiry.

A separate reviewer, writing in 2021, flagged dissatisfaction with the monthly subscription model. This is the least operationally significant observation, but it does indicate that the tool has been around long enough to have at least some historical user base — which is a marginally positive signal for continuity.

How to evaluate any tool with thin social proof

When G2 review volume is insufficient to provide buying confidence, the evaluation moves to other signals. The support responsiveness test is the most reliable preview of what support will look like during a production incident — file a real technical question before you commit. For the performance dimension, see webhooks.io performance failures.

GitHub issue activity. If the tool has a public GitHub repository, look at the issue tracker. Are issues being acknowledged and resolved, or are they sitting open for months with no response? Look at the date distribution of recent commits — is the repository actively maintained? A dormant repository is a meaningful risk signal for infrastructure tooling.

Changelog activity. A publicly maintained changelog or release notes page tells you whether the product is being actively developed. Look at the dates. A changelog with releases from 2023 and nothing since is a different product from one with monthly releases through 2025.

Support responsiveness test. Before committing, file a real support inquiry — a specific technical question about the failure mode the G2 reviewer described, or about their security model for signing secret validation. The response time and quality tell you more about support reliability than any G2 rating could. Teams paying for infrastructure tooling are implicitly paying for support quality. Test it before you need it.

Community signals. Is there an active community Slack, Discord, or forum? Are questions being answered? Community activity is a proxy for product health and developer adoption.

HookTunnel as a transparent alternative

The honest version of this comparison requires saying what HookTunnel is and what it is not. We accept the same thin-social-proof evaluation we apply to others — test before you commit. See HookTunnel's webhook inspection features and the flat $19/month Pro plan for specifics.

HookTunnel is a newer entrant in this space, which means our own review volume is limited. We would be making the same argument about thin social proof if we demanded you take our word for our own reliability.

What we can point to directly:

The pricing is flat at $19 per month for Pro. There are no per-request overages. Thirty days of history on Pro. Full raw HTTP payload capture — headers, body, timing, everything — not a summarized or truncated version. Replay to any endpoint, including local development URLs.

What we will not claim: our Terms of Service do not include uptime or delivery guarantees. We are not the right tool for mission-critical production systems where any webhook delivery gap represents a compliance or financial risk. That is a deliberate honest positioning. If your use case requires guaranteed delivery SLAs with contractual backing, you should be evaluating tools that explicitly offer them.

The use case HookTunnel fits: webhook inspection and debugging during development, staging, and incident recovery. Capturing inbound payloads from providers like Stripe and Twilio, inspecting them, replaying them against handlers that previously failed. Keeping thirty days of history so that a bad deployment on a Friday night does not mean lost payment events by Monday morning.

For that job, the tool is designed and priced appropriately. For production delivery guarantee requirements, the honest answer is that a different category of tooling is appropriate.

Thin review volume is a research prompt

Two G2 reviews does not mean webhooks.io is unreliable. Use the webhook vendor evaluation checklist to run a structured evaluation even when social proof is thin. It means the public evidence is insufficient to form a confident evaluation.

The appropriate response to thin social proof is not to dismiss the tool and not to trust it uncritically. It is to do the research that public reviews would normally short-circuit: GitHub activity, changelog freshness, a support responsiveness test, a direct conversation with someone who has used it in production.

The August 2024 reviewer's observation about performance-correlated failures is the one that deserves direct follow-up. Ask the vendor what happens when their layer experiences latency. Ask for the specifics of their security model. Ask what their incident communication process looks like.

Any vendor worth using has direct answers to those questions. A vendor whose answers are vague or unavailable is giving you information about what it will be like to rely on them when something goes wrong.

Thin review volume is not a red flag by itself. It is a research prompt. Treat it as one.