By Svix Team · Last updated
TL;DR
"Open source" in the webhook space covers a wide spectrum, and the license matters a lot more than it looks. True open-source licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0) let you run, modify, and even host the server for your customers without restriction. Source-available licenses (Elastic License v2.0, SSPL) let you read and self-host the code but place real restrictions on offering it as a managed service, and are not recognized as open source by the OSI. That distinction is the single most important factor on this page.
Below is a comparison of the open-source and source-available webhook tools most teams evaluate in 2026, with their licenses, maintenance state, and what each is actually good for.
License: MIT (true open source)
The Svix open-source server is MIT-licensed and fully compatible with the Svix hosted SaaS, with most of the functionality available for free self-hosting. It powers the webhook infrastructure of fast growing startups and the Fortune 500, with measured 99.99999% historical uptime on the hosted side. Features include retries with exponential backoff, durable replay, payload transformations, FIFO ordering, endpoint throttling, polling endpoints, Standard Webhooks compatibility, a wide destination matrix (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub, ServiceBus, EventBridge, S3, GCS, Azure Storage, and more), and SDKs in nine languages plus a CLI.
Best for: Any team that wants a true open-source webhook server (MIT) it can self-host without licensing risk, with the option to migrate to or from the hosted SaaS later. Also the most direct migration target from Convoy.
Not a good fit for: Hobbyist setups where you genuinely don't care about feature depth, ecosystem, or being able to migrate to a managed service later. Any minimal toy server will do.
Source on GitHub: github.com/svix/svix-webhooks/.
License: Apache 2.0 (true open source)
The open-source server behind Hookdeck's newer Outpost product. Apache 2.0 licensed, covers retries, replay, OpenTelemetry streaming, and a small set of destinations. The hosted Outpost SaaS has measured 99.9% historical uptime and lacks HIPAA, PCI-DSS, payload transformations, FIFO, and endpoint throttling.
Best for: Small teams that want an Apache-licensed self-hostable server and can tolerate the smaller feature surface and limited production maturity.
Not a good fit for: Regulated industries, customer-facing webhook delivery at scale, or anything that needs FIFO, throttling, transformations, or a broad destination matrix.
Read the full Svix Dispatch vs. Hookdeck Outpost comparison.
License: Elastic License v2.0 (source-available, not open source)
Convoy is licensed under the Elastic License v2.0, which is source-available rather than true open source. It restricts hosting Convoy as a managed service. The company behind Convoy essentially wound down, so the project is now maintained as a small side project rather than as a full-time commercial effort. It still ships retries, replay, circuit breaking, and JavaScript transformations, but has measured uptime below 99.0% over the last 12 months.
Best for: Hobbyist self-hosting where you're comfortable with a source-available license and maintaining the project yourself if you hit a bug.
Not a good fit for: Production workloads of any kind. With no active company behind it, missing FIFO and endpoint throttling, sub-99.0% measured uptime, and a non-OSS license, Convoy is not a safe choice for production webhooks.
Read the full Svix Dispatch vs. Convoy comparison.
License: SSPL (source-available, not open source)
Hook0 is licensed under the Server Side Public License, which is also source-available rather than true open source. The self-hosted Hook0 server covers subscriptions, retries, signatures, and replay, but only delivers HTTPS webhooks and lacks SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS on the hosted side.
Best for: Small EU teams running Hook0 self-hosted under SSPL terms with modest webhook volume and HTTPS-only destinations.
Not a good fit for: Anyone who needs a true open-source license, queue or object-store destinations, regulated-industry compliance, or anything beyond a few thousand events per day.
Read the full Svix Dispatch vs. Hook0 comparison.
License: Whatever license you choose
Rolling your own webhook delivery layer on top of a queue and a worker pool. If you have genuinely custom requirements, this can be a reasonable path. Worth noting that several of the projects above (Svix included) offer self-hosted and open-source options (Svix's MIT-licensed open-source server), so before going fully in-house it's often a good idea to start from one of those and customize as needed.
Best for: Teams with very specific, non-standard requirements and the engineering bandwidth to maintain webhook infrastructure long-term.
Not a good fit for: Most teams. Self-hosting an existing open-source server (Svix's MIT-licensed open-source server, for example) usually gets you most of the way there without taking on the long tail of retries, noisy neighbor isolation, observability, replay, transformations, FIFO, throttling, and a customer-facing portal.
See our build vs. buy analysis for the tradeoffs of running webhook delivery in-house.
If you want a true open-source webhook server you can run in production today, the MIT-licensed Svix server is the safer default by a wide margin: same codebase as the hosted SaaS, fully compatible with it, and battle-tested at the scale of fast-growing startups and the Fortune 500. Hookdeck Outpost is the only other true OSS option but is newer and narrower. Convoy and Hook0 are source-available rather than open source and come with real licensing restrictions, and the company behind Convoy in particular is no longer active.
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