What is a webhook?
A webhook is a way for external systems and applications to send data directly into your Tines workflows. Think of it as a doorway that allows other services to knock and deliver information to your automation in real-time.
When you create a webhook action in Tines, you get a unique URL that external systems can send HTTP requests to. Each time a request arrives at that URL, Tines captures the data and creates an event that flows through your story, triggering your automation.
Why use webhooks?
Webhooks enable event-driven automation. Your workflows react instantly when something happens in another system, rather than constantly checking for updates.
Common use cases include:
Receiving alerts from monitoring tools (PagerDuty, Datadog, Splunk)
Processing events from collaboration platforms (Slack, Microsoft Teams)
Handling notifications from code repositories (GitHub, GitLab)
Capturing form submissions from external websites
Integrating with third-party APIs that push data to you
Building custom integrations for any service that can make HTTP requests
How webhooks work in Tines
Here's the typical flow:
External system sends a request: Another service makes an HTTP POST, GET, PUT, or other request to your webhook URL
Tines receives the data: The webhook action captures the request body, headers, and parameters
Event is created: Tines converts the incoming data into an event
Workflow continues: Downstream actions in your story process the event data
Webhook vs. page: Which should you use?
It's important to understand the difference between webhooks and pages in Tines:
Webhook | Page |
Machine-to-machine communication | Human-to-machine interaction |
Receives API calls from external systems | Displays interactive web pages for users |
No visual interface, just an API endpoint | Full UI with forms, buttons, and content |
For automated integrations | For users to visit, view, and submit data |
Use a webhook when: External systems or APIs need to send data to Tines programmatically.
Use a page when: Humans need to visit a URL in their browser to see information or submit data (booking systems, forms, dashboards, portals).
Common webhook patterns
Here are a few examples of how you can use webhooks within your stories:
Alert processing
External monitoring tools send alerts to your webhook, which then enriches the data, creates tickets, and notifies teams.
Event forwarding
Your webhook receives events from one system, transforms them, and forwards them to multiple downstream services.
API gateway
Multiple external systems send data to different webhooks, which normalize and route the data through a unified workflow.
Callback handler
After initiating a long-running process in an external API, that API calls your webhook when the process completes.
Read more on webhooks in our docs, here.