# Webhooker vs Hookdeck: Receiving Webhooks in the EU or the US

> Webhooker vs Hookdeck Event Gateway: EU-only vs US hosting, retries, verification, billing, retention and DPA, checked 14 Sep 2026.

Source: https://webhooker.eu/blog/webhooker-vs-hookdeck
Last updated: 2026-09-14

Webhooker and Hookdeck Event Gateway both receive webhooks from providers like Stripe, GitHub and Shopify, verify them, queue them and redeliver on failure. The main difference is where they run. Hookdeck says Event Gateway is hosted in the US only, while Webhooker runs ingest, storage, delivery workers and backups only in the EU. Both offer filters and a CLI that forwards events to localhost. Beyond that, Hookdeck has the broader platform (50 automatic retries, SSO, more provider presets, unlimited seats on Team), and Webhooker has the simpler bill: one inbound event is one billable event however many destinations receive it, and a DPA comes with the €29 plan.

We build Webhooker, so read this as a vendor’s comparison. To make it easy to check, every Hookdeck fact below links to Hookdeck’s own pricing page, documentation or legal pages, checked on 14 September 2026. Where Hookdeck is stronger, the page says so. Prices and plans change, so confirm them before you sign.

## Do Webhooker and Hookdeck do the same job?

Partly. Hookdeck sells two products. [Event Gateway](https://hookdeck.com/docs/hookdeck-basics) receives webhooks and routes them to your services, and [Outpost](https://hookdeck.com/outpost/pricing) sends webhooks to your customers. Webhooker only receives. It forwards each event to your own destinations and signs those requests, but it has no subscriber management for sending webhooks to other companies.

So the fair comparison is Webhooker against Event Gateway. If you need both directions from one vendor, Hookdeck covers that and Webhooker does not. For sending alone, the [EU-hosted sending services in our Hookdeck alternatives guide](https://webhooker.eu/blog/hookdeck-alternatives-eu) are the better starting point.

## Where is your webhook data stored?

This is the question that decides most EU evaluations, and the two products give different answers.

Hookdeck’s own comparison article states that [“Event Gateway is currently hosted in the US only”](https://hookdeck.com/webhooks/platforms/hookdeck-event-gateway-vs-svix-ingest-webhook-receiving-comparison). The contracting entity is Hookdeck Technologies Inc., and its [sub-processor list](https://hookdeck.com/sub-processors) names Google Cloud, Cloudflare and Vercel for hosting, Aiven, ClickHouse Cloud and Dragonfly Cloud for databases, Sentry for error tracking and PostHog for analytics, among others. A [data processing addendum](https://hookdeck.com/dpa) is published. For an EU company, that means payloads carrying personal data leave the EU, and the transfer has to be covered in your records of processing and your DPA review. Outpost, the sending product, does offer a managed EU region, but only from its Growth plan.

Webhooker keeps [ingest, storage and delivery workers on Hetzner servers in Germany](https://webhooker.eu/#eu), with backups in the EU and no region to select. Retention limits are enforced per plan and deleted events are gone on every tier. Both paid plans include a DPA.

If US hosting is acceptable for your data, this section stops mattering and the rest of the page is a feature and pricing comparison. If it is not, the choice is mostly made here. Our guide to [whether webhooks count as personal data](https://webhooker.eu/blog/are-webhooks-personal-data-gdpr) covers which payload fields bring GDPR into scope.

## How do verification and retries compare?

Both check signatures before a request enters the pipeline. Hookdeck verifies with [built-in support for third-party providers](https://hookdeck.com/docs/authentication) plus generic HMAC, Basic Auth and API key methods, and its list of named providers is far longer. Webhooker has [presets for Stripe, GitHub and Shopify](https://webhooker.eu/docs/inbound-verification), including Stripe’s 300-second timestamp window, plus generic HMAC-SHA256 or SHA-1 with hex or base64 digests, Basic Auth and API keys. A request that fails verification gets a `401` and is stored for the audit trail but never delivered. Webhooker’s generic HMAC does not cover providers that sign a string including a message id, as Standard Webhooks does. For those you fall back to Basic Auth, an API key or verification in your own handler, so check your providers against both lists before choosing.

On failure handling, Hookdeck does more attempts. Event Gateway makes [up to 50 automatic retries](https://hookdeck.com/docs/retries) on a linear or exponential schedule, with unlimited manual and bulk retries. Webhooker retries six times over about five hours with exponential backoff, then moves the event to a dead-letter queue with single and bulk replay and per-attempt history. It also has a per-destination circuit breaker, so one endpoint that is clearly down stops consuming attempts. Fifty attempts suit a destination that may be offline for days. Six attempts plus a dead-letter queue suit teams that would rather be alerted and replay once the fix is deployed. Our article on [retries, backoff and circuit breakers](https://webhooker.eu/blog/webhook-retries-exponential-backoff) goes through that trade-off.

Both deliver at least once, so your consumers need [idempotency keys](https://webhooker.eu/blog/webhook-idempotency-keys) either way.

## What does each one cost?

The billing unit is the bigger difference, larger than the headline prices.

Hookdeck bills per event, and its [pricing page](https://hookdeck.com/pricing) defines an event as a message delivered to a destination, with retries included. Route one Stripe event to three services and that is three events. The Developer plan is free for up to 10,000 events with 3-day retention and one user. Team starts at $39 a month on pay-as-you-go usage with 7-day retention and unlimited users. Growth starts at $499 a month and adds 30-day retention, uptime and latency SLAs, and SSO. Hookdeck quotes event pricing as low as $0.33 per 100,000 at volume, includes 5 events per second of throughput per destination, and sells a static IP as a $100 add-on.

Webhooker bills per inbound webhook received, and fan-out to several destinations is free. [Pricing](https://webhooker.eu/pricing) is Free (10,000 events a month, 3 sources, 14-day retention), Pro (€29, 100,000 events, 50 sources, 30-day retention, DPA) and Team (€99, 1,000,000 events, 200 sources, 90-day retention, ordered delivery and a static outbound IP). There is no overage billing: usage up to 120% of the quota is free, and past that you move up a plan.

An example: say you receive 80,000 Stripe events a month and send each one to an order service, a data warehouse and a Slack alert. Hookdeck counts 240,000 delivered events. Webhooker counts 80,000, which fits the €29 Pro plan with 30-day retention and a DPA. For Hookdeck’s figure at your volume, use the estimator on its pricing page, since the Team price depends on usage. If every event goes to a single destination, the two units produce the same count and the comparison comes down to plan features. We compare the models in more depth in [webhook pricing models](https://webhooker.eu/blog/webhook-pricing-models).

## How do Webhooker and Hookdeck compare? (checked 14 September 2026)

Every Hookdeck cell comes from the pages linked above. Treat the table as a snapshot.

*Table: Webhooker and Hookdeck Event Gateway compared on hosting, verification, retries, billing, retention, seats and compliance.*

| Criterion | Hookdeck Event Gateway | Webhooker |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Direction | Receiving (Outpost sends) | Receiving only |
| Hosting | US only | EU only, Hetzner in Germany |
| Inbound verification | Many built-in providers, HMAC, Basic Auth, API key | Stripe, GitHub, Shopify presets, HMAC-SHA256/SHA1, Basic Auth, API key |
| Automatic retries | Up to 50, linear or exponential | 6 over ~5 hours, exponential, circuit breaker |
| Manual and bulk replay | Yes | Yes, from a dead-letter queue |
| Transformations | JavaScript | Yes, per destination |
| Filters | Headers, body, query, path | Headers and body |
| Billing unit | Delivered event, retries included | Inbound event, fan-out free |
| Over quota | Pay-as-you-go on Team | Free up to 120%, no overage billing |
| Free tier | 10,000 events, 3-day retention, 1 user | 10,000 events, 14-day retention, 1 member |
| Entry paid plan | Team from $39/mo, 7-day retention, unlimited users | Pro €29/mo, 30-day retention, 5 members |
| 30-day retention | Growth, from $499/mo | Pro, €29/mo |
| DPA | Published DPA | Included on Pro and Team |
| SSO | Growth and above | Not offered |
| Static IP | $100 add-on | Included on Team (€99/mo) |
| Local development | CLI forwards to localhost | CLI forwards to localhost, live tail in the dashboard |

## When is Hookdeck the better choice?

Pick Hookdeck when US hosting is acceptable and you want the broader platform. That covers teams that need SSO, unlimited seats on the entry paid plan, filters on query strings and paths as well as headers and body, or up to 50 automatic retries for destinations that can be offline for days. It also covers teams that want sending and receiving from one vendor, and teams that receive from long-tail providers that Webhooker only supports through generic HMAC. Hookdeck has been in this market for years, and its debugging tools reflect that.

## When is Webhooker the better choice?

Pick Webhooker when payloads carry personal data that has to stay in the EU, and your DPO wants every leg of the pipeline in Europe with no region setting to get wrong. It also fits when you fan events out to several destinations and do not want the bill to multiply, when you want 30-day retention and a DPA without moving to a $499 plan, and when a predictable invoice matters more than a long feature list. It also has clear limits: fewer named verification presets, fewer automatic retries, no SSO, no sending product, and a 1 MB body limit on ingest.

To test it against your own traffic, [create a free source](https://app.webhooker.eu/register), add it as a second endpoint next to Hookdeck in your Stripe dashboard, route it to two destinations, and compare both histories for a week. The Webhooker history should show one event with two deliveries.

## Frequently asked questions

### Is Hookdeck hosted in the EU?

Hookdeck Event Gateway is not. Hookdeck’s own comparison article says Event Gateway is currently hosted in the US only. Its sending product, Outpost, offers a managed EU region from the Growth plan. If you need to receive webhooks with the data kept in the EU, look at Webhooker, which is EU-only, or at Svix Ingest and Convoy, which offer EU regions. The [Hookdeck alternatives guide](https://webhooker.eu/blog/hookdeck-alternatives-eu) compares all of them.

### Is Webhooker cheaper than Hookdeck?

It depends on fan-out and retention. Hookdeck’s Team plan starts at $39 a month and bills each delivery to each destination, while Webhooker’s Pro plan is €29 a month for 100,000 inbound events regardless of how many destinations each one reaches. If you send every event to one place and 7-day retention is enough, the prices are close. If you fan out, or need 30-day retention, which Hookdeck includes from its $499 Growth plan and Webhooker from its €29 Pro plan, Webhooker usually costs less.

### Can I move from Hookdeck to Webhooker without downtime?

Yes, if you run both in parallel. Most providers, Stripe and GitHub among them, let you register more than one webhook endpoint, so add the Webhooker ingest URL next to the Hookdeck one, point both at the same destinations with idempotent consumers, and compare delivery histories for a week or two. Once they match, remove the Hookdeck endpoint at each provider. The provider URL has to change either way, because each gateway owns its own ingest URL.

### Does Webhooker have the same features as Hookdeck?

Not all of them. Hookdeck Event Gateway has features Webhooker does not: SSO, more built-in provider presets, query and path filters, and up to 50 automatic retries. Webhooker covers the core receiving job with verification, filters, retries with a circuit breaker, a dead-letter queue, bulk replay, per-destination transformations, outbound request signing, alerts and a CLI for local development, and differs mainly on EU-only hosting, fan-out billing and a DPA from €29.