Difference between ASP.NET WebHooks and Signal-R

Question

What is the difference between the newly release ASP.NET WebHooks and Signal-R? What are the advantages or disadvantages? What are the use cases for each technology?

Answer 1

SignalR is for notification within an ASP.NET app using WebSockets. You can exchange event notifications through WebSockets, however it requires a constant network connection.

WebHooks are for event notification across other web applications and other external services. (Think B2B communication). For instance, you can receive a WebHook when someone sends you money to your PayPal account. PayPal fires off a POST request to your predefined URL handler and then your app does something with that notification. You pre-configure everything on the PayPal side first. You also set up an application to handle the incoming POST request. The event notification is "pushed" to you in (near) real-time. No need to hold open a network connection while waiting for events.

The two can be complementary. For example, when you receive the WebHook from PayPal, you can notify a logged in user on your webapp (using SignalR/WebSockets) that money has been received successfully.

TLDR: Event notification across different web applications