An ngrok Alternative for Webhooks: Persistent URLs & Team Broadcast (2026)

If you searched for an ngrok alternative, you probably hit one of ngrok's free-plan limits: the 2-hour session timeout, the random URL that changes every time you restart, or the fact that a tunnel belongs to exactly one person. ngrok is a great general-purpose tunnel — but if your real job is receiving webhooks, especially across a team, a plain tunnel leaves the important parts to you.

Webhook Relay comes at it from the webhook side: a persistent URL that never changes, and a shared bucket your whole team can connect to so everyone receives the same events at once.

TL;DR

• Tired of re-pasting a URL that changes on every restart? Webhook Relay's endpoint URL is persistent on every plan, including free — set it once in Stripe, Twilio or GitHub and forget it.
• Whole team needs the same test webhooks? Point one bucket at Stripe/Twilio and every developer connects their agent to it — everyone's local backend receives the same events simultaneously. ngrok can't share one endpoint like this.
• Webhook has to reach a private server, container, or CI runner? The relay agent connects outbound and delivers into private networks with no public IP — a plain tunnel can't.
• ngrok is still the better pick for ad-hoc TCP/SSH tunnels and quick one-off port exposure.

ngrok vs Webhook Relay at a glance

Competitor details reflect publicly documented plans as of 2026 and can change — check ngrok's current pricing and features before deciding.

Where ngrok shines

Let's be fair. ngrok is excellent at what it was built for:

• General-purpose tunnels, including raw TCP and SSH.
• A polished traffic inspector with replay.
• A huge brand and ecosystem, recently expanded into an "AI & API gateway."

If you need to occasionally expose an arbitrary local port for a quick demo, ngrok is hard to beat.

Where Webhook Relay wins for webhooks

1. A persistent URL you configure once

The most common ngrok complaint is the changing URL. On the free plan every restart hands you a new random subdomain, so you re-paste it into every provider's webhook settings. With Webhook Relay, your bucket's endpoint URL is fixed for the life of the bucket — set it once in Stripe, Twilio or GitHub and never touch it again. Want it on your own hostname? Add a custom subdomain or domain. The URL surviving restarts, redeploys and laptop reboots is the whole point.

2. One bucket, your whole team

This is the difference a tunnel can't close. In Webhook Relay, multiple agents can connect to the same bucket, and every connected agent receives every webhook — a broadcast, not a hand-off.

Picture a team testing Stripe and Twilio integrations:

1. Create one bucket, say acme-payments-test, and give it a persistent URL.
2. Point Stripe's and Twilio's test webhooks at that URL — once, forever.
3. Every developer runs the agent against the same bucket:

relay forward --bucket acme-payments-test http://localhost:8080/webhooks

Now when a teammate triggers a test payment, every developer's local backend receives that same webhook at the same time. No one is hogging "the" tunnel, no one is re-pasting URLs into the Stripe dashboard, and a new hire is productive the moment they run one command. Everyone has a working local backend fed by real test events.

ngrok hands each tunnel to a single process. There's no shared endpoint that fans one event out to the whole team — so in practice one person owns the webhook URL and everyone else is blocked or improvising.

3. Deliver to localhost and private networks

ngrok exposes a port. Webhook Relay routes a webhook to wherever it needs to go — your laptop on localhost:8080, an internal API behind a firewall, or a Kubernetes service with no public IP. The agent makes an outbound connection, so there are no firewall ports to open. See webhooks to internal servers.

4. Events wait when your receiver is down

Close your laptop, redeploy, or restart mid-test and a plain tunnel simply drops whatever arrives. Webhook Relay persists every event and keeps retrying with durable retries — for up to 30 days — so the webhook that fired while you were rebooting still lands.

5. Do something to the webhook in flight

Because Webhook Relay sits in the path, you can transform payloads with JavaScript or Lua (turn a raw GitHub event into a Slack message), fan-out to multiple destinations, filter noisy events, verify signatures or retry on failure. A tunnel just moves bytes. In fact, forwarding is only one part of what Webhook Relay does — it's a full webhook gateway with authentication, throttling and delivery logs.

6. A real free tier for testing

Open Webhook Bin, get an instant URL, and watch requests arrive in real time — no signup, no install, no 2-hour clock. When you're ready to forward them somewhere, install the agent.

The same pattern powers your CI/CD

A CI/CD runner has exactly the ngrok problem, amplified: it's ephemeral and usually private, so a provider can't reach it at a stable public address. The persistent-URL-plus-outbound-agent model solves it — a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner, a Jenkins server behind a firewall, or a Harness delegate can all receive GitHub, GitLab or provider webhooks without a public IP, and the provider configuration never changes even as runners come and go.

We wrote this up in depth: receiving webhooks in CI/CD — GitHub Actions, Jenkins and Harness. If Jenkins is your world, start with the GitHub → Jenkins guide or webhooks to Jenkins on Kubernetes.

How to switch from ngrok in 2 minutes

1. Inspect first (no install): open Webhook Bin, copy the URL, and point your provider at it.
2. Forward to localhost: create a free account, install the agent, and run relay forward.
3. Share with the team: have each teammate run the same relay forward --bucket <name> command — everyone gets the same events.
4. Keep the URL forever: your endpoint doesn't change, so you never re-configure the provider.

Full steps are in the tunnels documentation.

When to pick which

• Pick ngrok for ad-hoc TCP/SSH tunnels and quick one-off port exposure.
• Pick Webhook Relay when the work is webhooks: a persistent URL, a bucket your whole team can share, delivery into private infrastructure and CI runners, and durable retries instead of dropped events.

Ready to stop re-pasting tunnel URLs? Start forwarding for free or test a webhook now.