Railhook vs Convoy — MIT-licensed Convoy alternative
Use this page to decide between Convoy and Railhook. Both send webhooks to your customers and receive webhooks from providers; the largest differences are the licence and what the self-hosted build includes.
Side by side
Section titled “Side by side”| Railhook | Convoy | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | MIT, approved by the OSI | Elastic License 2.0, source-available |
| Sending webhooks to your customers | Yes | Yes |
| Receiving webhooks from providers | Yes | Yes |
| Every feature self-hosted without a licence key | Yes | No |
| Self-hosted paid edition | None | Yes |
| Customer-facing portal | Yes, embeddable, in the free build | Portal links, in paid editions |
| Transformations | Yes, in every build | JavaScript transformations, in paid editions |
| OpenTelemetry | No | In paid editions |
| Role-based access control | Three fixed roles, in every build | In paid editions |
A dash means Convoy’s pages we checked did not settle the point. It is not a claim that the feature is missing.
When Convoy is the better choice
Section titled “When Convoy is the better choice”- You want traces, and a paid edition is fine. Convoy offers OpenTelemetry. Railhook exposes Prometheus metrics and no traces.
- You need finer-grained access control. Railhook has three fixed roles and two API key scopes, with no custom roles.
When Railhook is the better choice
Section titled “When Railhook is the better choice”- The licence matters to you. The Elastic License 2.0 is source-available, not an open-source licence approved by the OSI, and it restricts offering the software as a managed service. Railhook is MIT: you can run it, change it and ship it inside your own product.
- You want the whole product without paying for a key. Convoy puts portal links, JavaScript transformations, OpenTelemetry and RBAC in paid editions. Railhook has no licence key and no paid self-hosted edition: the embeddable customer portal, transformations, workflows, per-endpoint ordering, replay, PII masking and roles are all in the free build.
- You receive webhooks from well-known providers. Railhook verifies Stripe, GitHub, GitLab, Shopify, Slack and Twilio signatures itself. See Verification.
- You want to develop locally against real webhooks.
railhook listen 3000tunnels a public URL to your machine. See CLI.
Moving from Convoy
Section titled “Moving from Convoy”Convoy’s concepts carry over almost one to one: a project is a project, an endpoint an endpoint, a subscription a subscription, an event an event and a source a source. Railhook signs with the Standard Webhooks headers, so check what your receivers verify before you switch them. Migrate to Railhook has the mapping and a migration with both platforms live.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”Migrate to RailhookConcept mapping and a migration with both platforms live.
Organizations and rolesWhat Railhook's three roles can do.
How Railhook comparesRailhook next to every alternative, gaps included.