Best Way to Receive Updates from APIs Without Webhooks (Without Building Polling Systems)
April 23, 2026
When an API doesn't provide webhooks, the standard approach is incremental polling using cursors like updated_at or change tokens.
It works—but it requires building and maintaining a full synchronization system.
A more scalable approach is to centralize change detection and receive updates as events, so your application doesn't need to implement polling infrastructure.
Polling vs Webhooks vs Event-Driven APIs
There are three ways to receive updates from APIs:
| Approach | How it works | Tradeoffs |
|---|---|---|
| Polling | Your app repeatedly calls the API to check for updates | High maintenance, interval-based latency |
| Webhooks | The API sends updates when changes occur | Efficient, but not always available |
| Event delivery layer | Changes are detected and delivered as events | Consistent, removes polling logic from your app |
| Most APIs support the first two. Few support all three. |
Common approaches (and their limits)
Incremental polling (default)
Most teams implement:
- per-tenant cursors (
updated_at, tokens) - scheduled API reads
- idempotent upserts
This is often described as 'best practice.'
But in practice, it requires building:
- schedulers across tenants
- cursor storage per resource
- pagination handling
- retry and backoff logic
- rate-limit coordination
- reconciliation jobs for missed updates
At scale, most requests return no new data but still consume API quota and infrastructure resources.
Conditional requests (ETags / Last-Modified)
Some APIs support:
If-None-Match(ETag)If-Modified-Since
These reduce payload size by skipping unchanged responses.
Limitations:
- still requires polling
- does not identify which records changed
- inconsistent support across APIs
Delta queries (change-tracking APIs)
Some providers expose endpoints that return only changes since a previous request.
These are the cleanest pull-based model.
Limitations:
- provider-specific implementations
- token expiration and reset behavior
- not widely available across SaaS APIs
Long polling
The client sends a request that the server holds open until data changes.
Limitations:
- requires provider support
- introduces connection management complexity
- not a general solution across integrations
Snapshot diffing (last resort)
If no cursor or change tracking exists:
- fetch full dataset
- compare against previous state
- infer changes
Limitations:
- expensive at scale
- slow for large datasets
- difficult to maintain
The real problem: polling becomes a system
Most guidance stops at 'use incremental polling.'
In reality, polling becomes a system you need to build and operate:
- scheduling across tenants and integrations
- tracking state and cursors
- handling retries and failures
- managing rate limits
- reconciling missed updates
This is not just an API pattern—it's infrastructure.
What teams actually build
To make polling reliable, teams end up with:
- API reads
- change detection
- internal event generation
- downstream consumers
In other words:
they convert pull-based APIs into event-driven systems
This is the same pattern used by integration platforms and data pipelines—centralizing polling, change detection, and event delivery instead of implementing it per integration.
A better approach: centralize change detection
Polling is unavoidable at the API boundary.
But it doesn't need to live in your application.
The more scalable approach is to:
- read from source APIs
- detect changes using timestamps or cursors
- deliver those changes as events
Your application remains event-driven, without implementing polling infrastructure.
How Unified handles APIs without webhooks
Unified provides a single webhook interface across integrations, including APIs that do not natively support webhooks.
When native webhooks exist
- Unified subscribes to provider webhooks
- events are delivered directly
When webhooks do not exist
Unified:
- reads from source APIs
- detects changes using timestamps and cursors
- delivers those updates as webhook events
From your application's perspective:
- you receive webhook events in both cases
- no polling logic is required in your application
Unified handles:
- change detection
- rate-limit coordination
- retry and backoff behavior
- event delivery
Why this matters
The question isn't:
'How do I poll better?'
The real question is:
'Why is polling infrastructure inside my application?'
Polling is an implementation detail.
The decision is where that system lives.
Final takeaway
For APIs without webhooks, the default answer is polling.
But polling becomes a system at scale.
Most teams eventually build:
- change detection
- event routing
- retry and rate-limit handling
The more scalable approach is to centralize that system and receive updates as events.
Unified does this by:
- using native webhooks when available
- detecting changes and delivering events when they're not
So your application can stay event-driven—without building and maintaining polling infrastructure.