A webhook is a simple idea: instead of your app constantly asking "did anything happen yet?", the other service just pings you the instant it does — a payment clears, a form gets submitted, a deploy finishes. The catch is that you can't test a webhook by typing a URL into your browser like a normal page. You need a public URL that can catch the incoming request, show you exactly what was sent, and — once you're in production — reliably retry deliveries when your server is briefly down. That's the whole category below covers: from quick disposable test endpoints to production delivery infrastructure with retries and logging built in.
The short version: for a quick, free way to see what a webhook actually contains, webhook.site and UseWebhook.com both give you an instant catch-all URL. If you're debugging from inside an automated test suite rather than a browser, Svix Play fits that workflow better. Need to mock an entire API, not just catch one webhook? Beeceptor does rules-based mocking across REST, SOAP, gRPC and GraphQL. And once you're past testing and need webhooks to reliably reach your production server — with retries, queueing and monitoring — Hookdeck and Hook Relay are built for exactly that.
1. webhook.site — best free instant catch-all URL
webhook.site gives you a temporary, always-free URL (and email address) that captures anything sent to it — HTTP requests, webhooks, or emails — so you can inspect headers, payload and timing in a live dashboard.
Pricing: Freemium — free for basic use, paid plans from $7.50/month for more customization.
Verdict: the fastest way to answer "what is this service actually sending me?" with zero setup. Customization is limited on the free tier and it can lag under heavy traffic, but for a one-off debug session it's hard to beat.
2. UseWebhook.com — best for forwarding to localhost
UseWebhook.com captures and inspects webhooks from your browser, and can forward them straight to your localhost or replay past requests from history — useful when you're actively developing a webhook handler and want to re-trigger the same payload repeatedly without waiting for the real event.
Pricing: free.
Verdict: the replay-from-history feature is the standout — being able to re-fire the exact same webhook payload against your local server saves a lot of "trigger the real event again" busywork. It's a smaller, lesser-known tool, so don't expect much documentation or support depth.
3. Hookdeck — best generous free tier for real monitoring
Hookdeck lets you develop, test, and monitor webhooks with a dashboard for inspecting traffic over time, not just a single request. The free tier covers 100,000 requests and 100,000 delivery attempts per month with three days of retention.
Pricing: Freemium — free up to 100K requests/month, paid plans from $39/month.
Verdict: the free tier is genuinely usable for a small-to-mid production app, not just a demo — 100K requests/month covers a lot of real traffic. Advanced features get expensive once you outgrow it, and independent reviews/info are relatively sparse online.
4. Hook Relay — best done-for-you retry logic
Hook Relay adds webhook support to your own app without you having to build the queueing, retry-with-backoff and logging yourself. The free plan includes 100 deliveries/day, 14-day retention and 3 hook endpoints.
Pricing: Freemium — free (100 deliveries/day), paid tiers not publicly specified.
Verdict: if you're the one sending webhooks to your customers (rather than receiving them), this is the more relevant tool — retry-with-backoff is exactly the reliability logic most teams end up hand-rolling badly. Paid pricing isn't published up front, so budget-conscious teams will need to ask before committing.
5. Svix Play — best for testing from a test suite
Svix Play is a webhook tester and debugger built to be called directly from your automated test suite, rather than only through a browser dashboard.
Pricing: free.
Verdict: narrowly focused but well suited to teams who want webhook checks as part of CI rather than a manual step. Documentation is thin and it's not a widely known tool yet, so expect to read the source/API directly rather than lean on community guides.
6. Beeceptor — best for mocking a whole API, not just one endpoint
Beeceptor is a no-code, cloud-based platform for mocking and debugging APIs across REST, SOAP, gRPC and GraphQL, with rules-based logic, stateful CRUD mocking, proxying and CORS handling. The free plan gives 50 requests/day with a public dashboard.
Pricing: Freemium — free (50 requests/day), paid options not fully detailed.
Verdict: the right tool when the problem is bigger than one webhook — e.g. you need to fake an entire third-party API while your integration is still being built. The free plan's dashboard is public by default, which is worth noting if the payloads you're mocking are sensitive.
| Tool | Best for | Price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| webhook.site | Instant catch-all URL, browser inspection | Free / from $7.5/mo | Yes |
| UseWebhook.com | Forward to localhost, replay history | Free | Yes, full |
| Hookdeck | Ongoing monitoring, generous limits | Free / from $39/mo | 100K req/mo |
| Hook Relay | Sending webhooks reliably (retries) | Free / custom | 100 deliveries/day |
| Svix Play | Testing inside a CI test suite | Free | Yes |
| Beeceptor | Mocking a full API, not one endpoint | Free / custom | 50 req/day |
For a quick debug session, webhook.site or UseWebhook.com will answer your question in under a minute and cost nothing. The moment you're relying on webhooks in production — meaning a missed delivery actually breaks something for a customer — that's when it's worth moving to Hookdeck or Hook Relay, since retry-with-backoff and delivery monitoring are exactly the parts most teams get wrong when they build it themselves.