Comparison
ShellOrbit vs Convoy
Convoy is a real open source webhook gateway with an actively maintained repository, and if you are willing to run it yourself it is free forever. That is a genuinely hard offer to compete with on price, because the price is zero. The comparison is not really feature against feature, it is whether you would rather operate a database, a queue and a worker fleet, or pay someone to do it.
Choose Convoy when
You are comfortable running Postgres, Redis and a worker fleet, you want the source, you need to send webhooks as well as receive them, or your data cannot leave your own infrastructure.
Choose ShellOrbit when
You do not want another service in your on call rotation, you want a bill instead of an operational burden, and $15 a month is cheaper than the hours you would spend on the alternative.
| What is being compared | ShellOrbit | Convoy |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Receiving inbound webhooks only. | Advantage Convoy. Both. Sends to your customers and receives from third parties. |
| Licence | Closed source. Hosted by us, no self host option. | Advantage Convoy. Open source. The Community edition is free forever. |
| Cost to run it yourself | Not possible. | Advantage Convoy. Free, plus whatever your servers cost. |
| Project health | One developer, launched 2026. | Advantage Convoy. Active repository with commits within the last week and several thousand stars. Some competitor comparison pages claim this project is abandoned. We checked the repository ourselves on the date above and it is not. |
| Published managed pricing | Advantage ShellOrbit. $0, $15, $40 and $99 a month, all listed. | Premium self hosted is $999 a month. Cloud pricing is not published. |
| Free managed tier | Advantage ShellOrbit. 15,000 events a month, indefinitely. | A 14 day cloud trial at 100 events a day. |
| What you operate | Advantage ShellOrbit. Nothing. An endpoint URL and a destination. | A database, a queue and worker processes, kept patched and monitored. |
| Time to first received event | Advantage ShellOrbit. Minutes. | As long as your deployment takes. |
| Payload transformation | Available on the $40 plan and above. | JavaScript transformations included. |
| Circuit breaking on a failing destination | Retries with configurable backoff, plus alerts. No circuit breaker. | Advantage Convoy. Circuit breaking built in. |
| How long events are kept | 3 to 90 days depending on plan, published. | Advantage Convoy. As long as your own database keeps them, if you self host. |
| Uptime commitment | Advantage ShellOrbit. 99.9 percent monthly on the $99 plan, in the terms. | Yours to provide, if you self host. |
Where Convoy is genuinely better
It is free. Not free tier free. Actually free, forever, at any volume, if you run it. No comparison table beats that on price and we are not going to construct one that pretends otherwise.
You get the source. You can read it, patch it, and keep your event data entirely inside your own infrastructure. For some organisations that is not a preference, it is the requirement that ends the evaluation.
It sends as well as receives, and it has circuit breaking, which ShellOrbit does not.
Where ShellOrbit is genuinely better
Free software is not free. Convoy self hosted needs Postgres, Redis and worker processes, all of which need somewhere to run, upgrades, monitoring, and someone awake when the queue backs up at 2am. If webhook delivery is the thing you were trying to stop worrying about, self hosting the webhook gateway is a slightly odd way to get there. ShellOrbit’s $15 a month buys the absence of that work.
Managed pricing is published. Convoy’s cloud pricing is not on the site, and the self hosted Premium tier is $999 a month. ShellOrbit’s four prices are on the pricing page and one of them is zero.
Somebody is contractually on the hook. Our $99 plan carries a 99.9 percent monthly commitment in the terms of service. Self hosted, the uptime commitment is one you make to yourself.
One correction
Comparison pages published by other vendors in this category claim Convoy has wound down. We checked the repository directly on the date at the top of this page: it has commits from within the last week and several thousand stars. It is being maintained. We would rather lose a row on this table than repeat a competitor’s marketing about a third product.
Try it on your own webhooks
Free for 15,000 events a month, no card. Paid plans start at $15.