Is Hookdeck or Soketi better?

Neither clearly leads. Hookdeck starts at Free and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.

Which is cheaper, Hookdeck or Soketi?

Hookdeck starts at Free and Soketi at Free.

Does Hookdeck or Soketi run on more platforms?

Hookdeck runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows. Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows.

Can I use Hookdeck for free?

Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.

What is Hookdeck best used for?

Hookdeck is most often used for a payments integration where losing a stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfilled, fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separately, debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fix, receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnel. Of those, a payments integration where losing a stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfilled and fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separately are not what Soketi is typically brought in for.

What can Hookdeck do that Soketi cannot?

Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Automatic retries, Filters and fan-out, Transformations. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.

Developer Tools · head to head

Hookdeck vs Soketi

Hookdeck

Developer Tools

Event gateway that receives, queues, retries and replays inbound webhooks

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

Soketi

Developer Tools

Self-hosted, Pusher-compatible WebSockets server with a stalled maintenance record

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

The short version

Each has a real cost: Hookdeck pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.; Soketi maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
They diverge on capability: Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility.
Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Hookdeck and Soketi actually diverge.

Attributes where Hookdeck and Soketi differ
Attribute	Hookdeck	Soketi
Pricing model	Per month by delivered event count	Open source, no licence fee
Platforms	Web, Linux, macOS, Windows	Linux, macOS, Windows

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 Hookdeck

Ingest and persist
Automatic retries
Filters and fan-out
Transformations
Local development CLI
Rate limiting

Only in Soketi

Pusher protocol compatibility
Presence and private channels
Horizontal scaling
App management backends
Webhooks
Prometheus metrics

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Hookdeck

A payments integration where losing a Stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfillednot Soketi
Fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separatelynot Soketi
Debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fixnot Soketi
Receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnelnot Soketi

Soketi

A Laravel application that already uses Echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime providernot Hookdeck
Realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasonsnot Hookdeck
A local or CI environment that needs a Pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid accountnot Hookdeck
A high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure billnot Hookdeck

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

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.

Soketi

Maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
Dependency drift on Node and uWebSockets.js will eventually force you to fork or migrate, and that cost is unbudgeted at the point you adopt it.
There is no commercial support to buy, so a production incident at three in the morning is entirely your problem with no escalation path.
Scaling beyond a single node needs Redis and careful configuration, and getting presence channels correct across nodes is a genuine source of subtle bugs.
It implements the Pusher protocol rather than tracking it, so any protocol feature Pusher adds later will not appear, and the compatibility guarantee slowly decays.

Pricing, plan by plan

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

Soketi

Free

SoketiFree
- MIT licensed
- Unlimited connections subject to your own hardware
- No vendor billing

Which should you pick?

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.

Hookdeck review

Choose Soketi if

You need pusher protocol compatibility.
You want to start without paying.
You work on Linux, macOS, Windows.
You also want presence and private channels.

Soketi review

Questions people ask

Is Hookdeck or Soketi better?: Neither clearly leads. Hookdeck starts at Free and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Hookdeck or Soketi?: Hookdeck starts at Free and Soketi at Free.
Does Hookdeck or Soketi run on more platforms?: Hookdeck runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows. Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows.
Can I use Hookdeck for free?: Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
What is Hookdeck best used for?: Hookdeck is most often used for a payments integration where losing a stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfilled, fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separately, debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fix, receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnel. Of those, a payments integration where losing a stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfilled and fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separately are not what Soketi is typically brought in for.
What can Hookdeck do that Soketi cannot?: Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Automatic retries, Filters and fan-out, Transformations. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Hookdeck: Is there a free plan?

Yes, ten thousand events a month with three-day retention and one user.

Soketi: Is Soketi still maintained?

Barely. The maintainer has stated that available time is very limited and releases have been sparse; treat it as community-maintained.

Hookdeck: How is usage counted?

By delivered events, so a single inbound webhook fanned out to three destinations counts as three.

Soketi: Do I need to change my client code?

No. Pusher client SDKs and Laravel Echo work by changing the host, port and credentials.

Hookdeck: Can I replay a failed webhook?

Yes, individually or in bulk from the console, with the original payload.

Soketi: What does it cost?

Nothing in licence fees. It is MIT licensed; you pay for the server it runs on.

Hookdeck: Does it work for outbound webhooks too?

Yes, the same queueing, retry and observability applies to webhooks you send.

Soketi: What are people moving to?

Laravel Reverb for Laravel applications, and Sockudo, a Rust reimplementation, for others.

Hookdeck vs Soketi

Hookdeck

Soketi

The short version

Where they differ

What each one covers

Only in Hookdeck

Only in Soketi

What people use each for

Hookdeck

Soketi

Where each one falls short

Hookdeck

Soketi

Pricing, plan by plan

Hookdeck

Soketi

Which should you pick?

Choose Hookdeck if

Choose Soketi if

Questions people ask

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Related pages

More on Hookdeck

More on Soketi

Keep looking

Other head to heads