Webhooks vs. polling: how to actually wire up chatbot events

Polling an API on a timer for new conversations or leads means you're always trading latency against request volume — poll less often and you're slow to react, poll more often and you're burning rate limit budget on mostly-empty responses.

Webhooks flip the model: your endpoint sits idle until an event actually happens, then receives a payload the moment it does. For a lead-capture flow, that's the difference between a Slack notification seconds after a visitor submits their email and one that shows up on the next scheduled sync.

The one thing polling still does better is resilience against a flaky receiving endpoint — if your webhook URL is down when an event fires, you need retry logic on the sending side (which PrimeWebKit handles) and a way to reconcile via the delivery log after the fact.

In practice, most integrations are best served by webhooks for real-time action and an occasional API read for reconciliation — not one or the other exclusively.