Developer Tools · head to head
Earthly vs Hookdeck
Hookdeck
Developer Tools
Event gateway that receives, queues, retries and replays inbound webhooks
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Earthly pricing model not published; requires sales contact; Hookdeck pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.
- They diverge on capability: Earthly covers Policy as code, Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Earthly and Hookdeck actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated), category (Developer Tools).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Earthly
- Policy as code
- Multi-stage enforcement
- AI agent governance
- Repository-wide policies
- Incident response automation
- Compliance management
- Earthfiles build tool
- Satellites
Only in Hookdeck
- Ingest and persist
- Automatic retries
- Filters and fan-out
- Transformations
- Local development CLI
- Rate limiting
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Earthly
- Enforcing engineering standards across AI and human developersnot Hookdeck
- Automating incident response procedures across all repositoriesnot Hookdeck
- Embedding compliance requirements into development workflowsnot Hookdeck
- Standardizing build processes with Earthfilesnot Hookdeck
Hookdeck
- A payments integration where losing a Stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfillednot Earthly
- Fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separatelynot Earthly
- Debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fixnot Earthly
- Receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnelnot Earthly
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Earthly
- Pricing model not published; requires sales contact
- Earthly Lunar is a recent launch (2025) with limited track record
- Primarily GitHub-focused; limited integration with other platforms
- No public documentation on pricing or feature tiers
Hookdeck
- Pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.
- Free-tier retention is three days, which is shorter than the time it typically takes to notice a failing integration, so the payloads needed for a replay are often already gone.
- It becomes a single point of failure in front of every third-party integration, and an outage there means every provider webhook queues or fails at once.
- The transformation layer runs JavaScript in a constrained environment, so anything that needs a database lookup or an external call has to happen downstream instead.
- For a team already running Kafka or SQS the value is mostly the console and the replay UI, which is a hard cost to justify against infrastructure they already operate.
Pricing, plan by plan
Earthly
FreeNo published plan breakdown. See the Earthly review.
Hookdeck
Free- DeveloperFree
- Up to ten thousand events per month
- Three-day retention
- One user
- Team$39/month
- Ten thousand events included
- Unlimited users
- Pay as you go metering above the included events
- Growth$499/month
- Ten thousand events included plus metered usage
- Thirty-day retention
- Uptime and latency SLAs
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Negotiated event volume
- Custom retention
- Dedicated support
Which should you pick?
Choose Earthly if
- You need policy as code.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Web, CLI.
- You also want multi-stage enforcement.
Choose Hookdeck if
- You need ingest and persist.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows.
- You also want automatic retries.
Questions people ask
- Is Earthly or Hookdeck better?
- Neither clearly leads. Earthly starts at Free and Hookdeck at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Earthly or Hookdeck?
- Earthly starts at Free and Hookdeck at Free.
- Does Earthly or Hookdeck run on more platforms?
- Earthly runs on Web, CLI. Hookdeck runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows.
- Can I use Earthly for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Earthly best used for?
- Earthly is most often used for enforcing engineering standards across ai and human developers, automating incident response procedures across all repositories, embedding compliance requirements into development workflows, standardizing build processes with earthfiles. Of those, enforcing engineering standards across ai and human developers and automating incident response procedures across all repositories are not what Hookdeck is typically brought in for.
- What can Earthly do that Hookdeck cannot?
- Earthly covers Policy as code, Multi-stage enforcement, AI agent governance, Repository-wide policies. Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Automatic retries, Filters and fan-out, Transformations.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Earthly: What is the difference between Earthfiles and Earthly Lunar?
Earthfiles is an open-source build tool that reached 12,000 GitHub stars and is used by companies like NVIDIA, Intel, and Databricks. Earthly Lunar is a separate governance platform launched in 2025 for enforcing standards across development workflows.
SourceHookdeck: Is there a free plan?
Yes, ten thousand events a month with three-day retention and one user.
Earthly: How does Earthly Lunar enforce standards?
Lunar converts engineering standards, compliance requirements, and processes documented in AGENTS.md files, wikis, and incident postmortems into enforceable guardrails that apply consistently across repositories and development stages.
SourceHookdeck: How is usage counted?
By delivered events, so a single inbound webhook fanned out to three destinations counts as three.
Earthly: What is the pricing for Earthly Lunar?
Pricing is not published on the website. Interested customers should contact Earthly's sales team for current pricing and feature tiers.
SourceHookdeck: Can I replay a failed webhook?
Yes, individually or in bulk from the console, with the original payload.
Hookdeck: Does it work for outbound webhooks too?
Yes, the same queueing, retry and observability applies to webhooks you send.
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