A smee.io Alternative for Reliable Webhook Forwarding
smee.io is great for quick GitHub webhook tests but is explicitly dev-only. Webhook Relay is a production-ready smee.io alternative: stable URLs, retries, and forwarding to localhost or private servers.
smee.io is the webhook proxy from the GitHub/Probot ecosystem. It's a handy way to receive GitHub webhooks on your laptop while building a bot or an integration — paste the channel URL, run the client, done. But smee.io is explicitly meant for development, not production, and it offers no retries, persistence, stable guarantees or support.
Webhook Relay does the same localhost forwarding, but is built to be relied on.
TL;DR
- Hacking on a Probot app or a quick GitHub integration? smee.io is fine.
- Need it to keep working — with retries, a URL that won't disappear, and delivery to a private CI server? Use Webhook Relay.
smee.io vs Webhook Relay
| smee.io | Webhook Relay | |
|---|---|---|
| Forward webhooks to localhost | Yes | Yes |
| Stable, persistent URL | Best-effort | Yes |
| Retries on failure | No | Yes |
| Request inspection UI | Basic | Webhook Bin |
| Transform payloads | No | Yes |
| Deliver to private server / Kubernetes | No | Yes |
| Authentication on the endpoint | No | Yes |
| Intended for production | No (dev only) | Yes |
| Support / SLA | Community | Paid plans |
The same five-minute setup, but production-grade
GitHub → Webhook Relay → your machine:
- Create a free account and note your endpoint URL.
- Add it as a webhook in your GitHub repo (Settings → Webhooks).
- Run the agent to deliver events to your local server or CI:
relay forward --bucket github http://localhost:3000/github/webhook
Because the URL is stable and deliveries retry, you can leave it running — for a dev box or a real internal CI server behind a firewall. See the GitHub + Jenkins guide for a CI example.
Why move off smee.io for anything real
smee.io is a great convenience for the Probot tutorial. The moment a missed delivery matters — a CI build that didn't trigger, a bot that went quiet — you want retries, persistence and visibility. That's the line between a dev helper and infrastructure.
Start free, or inspect a GitHub webhook in your browser first.