ngrok tunnels anything. Eventfy just catches webhooks — permanently.
They solve different problems, and the honest answer is a lot of people need both. This page is about the one job that matters here: getting a webhook from Stripe, GitHub, or Shopify onto your machine without losing it.
Pick ngrok if…
You need to expose any local port — a full app, a webhook, a webhook, an internal demo — for a live session right now, and you don't need what happened yesterday.
Pick Eventfy if…
You specifically deal with webhooks, want a URL that never changes, and want a real history of what arrived while you weren't watching.
Side by side
| ngrok (free tier) | Eventfy | |
|---|---|---|
| URL stability | New random URL every restart, unless paid | Permanent from day one, on every plan |
| Works while your laptop is off | No — tunnel dies with the process | Yes — it's a hosted catcher, not a tunnel |
| Event history | Session-only inspector, gone on restart | 30–90 days, searchable |
| Re-fire a payload with edits | Replay only, no editing | Edit any field, re-fire as many times as needed |
| Setup | Install a binary, create an account, auth token | Sign up, copy a URL — nothing to install to receive events |
| Local forwarding | Yes, that's the core feature | Yes, via the CLI, once you're ready to write the handler |
| General-purpose tunneling (non-webhook) | Yes — that's what it's for | No — Eventfy is intentionally scoped to webhooks |
Where ngrok is actually the better call
If you need to expose a whole app, not just catch webhooks
Demoing a full local app to a client over a video call, sharing a local build for someone else to poke at, exposing a port that isn't a webhook receiver at all — that's squarely ngrok's job, and Eventfy doesn't try to do it. If your actual need is "tunnel my localhost," use ngrok. If your need is specifically "I keep losing Stripe webhooks between restarts," that's the problem Eventfy exists for.
The actual moment this matters
It's not a feature checklist that decides this — it's the specific 20 minutes where a webhook fires while your tunnel is down, or you've restarted ngrok for the fifth time today and forgotten to update the URL in Stripe again. Eventfy's catch URL is the same URL forever, so that specific failure mode just doesn't happen. Everything else — the CLI forwarding, the re-fire, the test suites — exists to make the debugging loop after that faster too.
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