Do you need a webhook tool at all?
Sometimes no. Every comparison site skips this page, so here it is: what the platforms already give you, when that is enough, and the specific gaps that made us build an inspector. We would rather you leave with the right answer than with a subscription.
The gold standard: the Stripe CLI
If your webhooks come from Stripe, stripe listen
forwards live events to localhost, the dashboard shows every
delivery attempt with its response code, and you can resend from
there. It is excellent, it is free, and for Stripe-only work you do
not need us or anyone else. The catch is the obvious one: it ends at
Stripe's border. The commerce platforms never built their
equivalent.
What each commerce platform gives you
BigCommerce has no webhook admin UI at all: webhooks are created, listed and deleted over the API, and there is no delivery log. When a hook goes quiet (BigCommerce deactivates one after enough failures), you find out from the silence.
WooCommerce shows a webhook list and a delivery log counter, but the log stopped recording payloads years ago. Deliveries fire from wp-cron on its own schedule, and five failures disable the webhook without a notification.
Square is the best of the set: the developer dashboard shows event logs and lets you resend. Logs are tied to the app in the dashboard, and there is no forward-to-localhost.
Shopify shows registered webhooks in admin but no payloads; delivery metrics live in obscure corners, and admin-created versus API-created webhooks behave differently enough to be its own debugging category.
When the built-ins are enough
- Stripe-only integrations. Use the Stripe CLI, sincerely.
- A Square-only integration where the developer dashboard's event log answers your questions.
- A stable, long-shipped integration that never changes: if nothing is being debugged, nothing needs inspecting.
- One-off curiosity about any HTTP traffic: a free request bin does that without an account.
When they are not
The moment you are actively building or debugging against BigCommerce, WooCommerce or Shopify, the missing piece is always the same: nobody shows you the payload. You end up adding log lines to production handlers and redeploying to answer "what did the platform actually send". That is the gap CommerceHook fills: register the webhooks from a panel, read every delivery whole (headers, signature verdict, raw body), jump to the order it describes, and replay it at your handler once fixed. On the Free tier that costs nothing; Pro is $6 a month for 90-day history.
Still unsure? Keep the platform tools and point one webhook at a free endpoint next time something misbehaves.
Also compared: webhook.site , Hookdeck , EventDock and ngrok .