Every business in the fast-moving tech world is in the race to provide faster services to their users, API and Wekhook helps them to achieve this goal. APIs and webhooks are both responsible for the communication between two applications, But they often get confused with each other.
In this article we will discuss the difference between API and Webhook, but before that we need to understand what exactly is API and Webhook to understand the difference between these two.
What is API?
API (Application Programming Interface) helps application to talk to each other and share some data. Its a two-way communication between application which share information. The purpose of API can be understood by word “Interface” in it. For example the Web Browser we use is the interface for us humans which talk to the server and receive, send, update the request data for us so we can read it. The most common use case of API is it allow communication between front-end and back-end which is two-way communication on the basis of request and response. API help to interface two different software so they can connect and share information effectively.
What is Webhook?
A webhook can be considered as a lightweight version of API that driven by some event in the application instead of request to notify other application. Which is why some time also known as “Reversed API” as it is a one-way communication between applications.
Webhooks is a user-defined HTTP callbacks which is used to notify other applications about activity in the application. For example if you have ever used “Stripe” an online payment gateway, it has a webhook to notify real-time update of payments whenever the user click in pay button on the application.
The Difference between API and Webhook
API (Application Programming Interface ) is two-way communication between application for sharing resources between them. API can handle the collection of whole CRUD(Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations between applications.
Webhooks are event driven lightweight API’s which is one-way communication between application just for sending data and notify other applications. it can be used where we need real-time updates.
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