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Developer Tools · head to head

Hookdeck vs Tinybird

Hookdeck logo

Hookdeck

Developer Tools

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

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Tinybird logo

Tinybird

Databases

Managed ClickHouse with a workflow that turns SQL queries into hosted HTTP APIs

From
Free
Free plan
Yes

The short version

  • Free plans on both; paid from $39/mo and $25/mo.
  • Only Hookdeck lists ingest and persist; only Tinybird lists managed ClickHouse.
  • Where Hookdeck falls short: pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.
  • Prices and features on this page were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Hookdeck and Tinybird actually diverge.

Attributes where Hookdeck and Tinybird differ
AttributeHookdeckTinybird
Pricing modelPer month by delivered event countPer month by compute and storage
PlatformsWeb, Linux, macOS, WindowsWeb, Linux, macOS
CategoryDeveloper ToolsDatabases

Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes).

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 Tinybird

  • Managed ClickHouse
  • Pipes as APIs
  • Events HTTP endpoint
  • Streaming connectors
  • Materialized views
  • Git-based workflow
  • Token-scoped auth
  • Observability

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 Tinybird
  • Fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separatelynot Tinybird
  • Debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fixnot Tinybird
  • Receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnelnot Tinybird

Tinybird

  • A SaaS product adding a per-customer usage dashboard that must render in under a second across billions of eventsnot Hookdeck
  • A team building rate limiting or fraud checks that need an aggregate over the last few minutes returned inside a request cyclenot Hookdeck
  • A data team offloading interactive operational dashboards from Snowflake, where per-query warehouse cost makes constant refresh untenablenot Hookdeck
  • A game or ad-tech company ingesting a high-volume event stream and exposing live counters back to customers through an APInot 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

Tinybird

  • It is ClickHouse underneath, so it inherits ClickHouse limits: multi-table joins degrade badly at scale, updates and deletes are expensive mutations rather than cheap operations, and a poorly chosen sorting key at table creation cannot be fixed without rebuilding the data
  • Compute is metered per vCPU-second with overage at 0.0002 USD per second, so an inefficient query shipped to production shows up directly on the invoice rather than merely running slowly
  • Only the Enterprise tier gets horizontal scaling and dedicated infrastructure; Free, Developer and SaaS all run on shared infrastructure with vertical scaling only, which caps both isolation and headroom for anyone not on a custom contract
  • Storage is billed at 0.058 USD per gigabyte on top of compute, and egress is charged separately at 0.01 USD per gigabyte intra-cloud and 0.10 USD inter-cloud, so a high-fanout API serving many small responses accrues costs in three places at once
  • You are building on a proprietary workflow around an open database: the pipes, tokens and API layer are Tinybird specific, so leaving means keeping your data but rewriting the entire serving layer you adopted Tinybird to avoid writing

Pricing, plan by plan

Hookdeck

Free
  • DeveloperFree
    • Up to ten thousand events per month
    • Three-day retention
    • One user
  • Team$39/mo
    • Ten thousand events included
    • Unlimited users
    • Pay as you go metering above the included events
  • Growth$499/mo
    • Ten thousand events included plus metered usage
    • Thirty-day retention
    • Uptime and latency SLAs
  • EnterpriseOn request
    • Negotiated event volume
    • Custom retention
    • Dedicated support

Tinybird

Free
  • FreeFree
    • 0.25 vCPU on shared infrastructure
    • 10 GB storage included
    • 1,000 requests per day
  • Developer$25/mo
    • 0.5 vCPU scaling to 8 vCPU
    • 25 GB storage included
    • Two replicas
  • SaaSOn request
    • Up to 32 vCPU
    • 500 GB storage included
    • Four to sixteen threads per request
  • EnterpriseOn request
    • Unlimited vCPU and bottomless storage
    • Dedicated infrastructure and private regions
    • Vertical and horizontal scaling

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.

Choose Tinybird if

  • You need managed clickhouse.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Web, Linux, macOS.
  • You also want pipes as apis.

Questions people ask

Is Hookdeck or Tinybird better?
Neither clearly leads. Hookdeck starts at Free and Tinybird at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Hookdeck or Tinybird?
Hookdeck starts at Free and Tinybird at Free.
Does Hookdeck or Tinybird run on more platforms?
Hookdeck runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows. Tinybird runs on Web, Linux, macOS.
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 Tinybird is typically brought in for.
What can Hookdeck do that Tinybird cannot?
Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Automatic retries, Filters and fan-out, Transformations. Tinybird covers Managed ClickHouse, Pipes as APIs, Events HTTP endpoint, Streaming connectors.

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.

Tinybird: Is Tinybird just hosted ClickHouse?

No. The database is ClickHouse, but the product is the layer above it: publishing parameterised SQL as authenticated, rate-limited REST endpoints without writing an API server.

Hookdeck: How is usage counted?

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

Tinybird: What does it actually cost?

Free tier at 1,000 requests a day, Developer from 25 USD a month, then compute at 0.0002 USD per vCPU-second and storage at 0.058 USD per gigabyte. Higher tiers are quoted.

Hookdeck: Can I replay a failed webhook?

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

Tinybird: Can I run it on my own infrastructure?

Only on Enterprise, which offers dedicated infrastructure and private regions. Lower tiers are shared multi-tenant cloud.

Hookdeck: Does it work for outbound webhooks too?

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

Tinybird: Does it handle updates and deletes?

Poorly, as ClickHouse does. Design for append-only event data; frequent mutation is the wrong workload for this engine.

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