Comparison
ShellOrbit vs Svix
These two products are usually not alternatives. Svix exists so that your product can send webhooks to its customers. ShellOrbit exists so that your product can receive webhooks from Stripe, GitHub, or whoever else is calling you. If you are building a webhook feature for your own users, stop reading and go to Svix. The comparison below only matters for the narrow case where you are choosing between Svix Ingest and ShellOrbit for inbound traffic.
Choose Svix when
You are sending webhooks to your own customers, you need a compliance report, you want an open source server you could self host later, or 50,000 events a month free is the number that decides it.
Choose ShellOrbit when
You are receiving webhooks rather than sending them, and $490 a month for the first paid tier is not a number your project can justify.
| What is being compared | ShellOrbit | Svix |
|---|---|---|
| The problem it solves | Receiving webhooks that other services send to you. Different jobs. Plenty of companies need both. | Sending webhooks from your product to your customers. |
| Inbound receiving | Advantage ShellOrbit. The entire product. | Svix Ingest, a separate product alongside the main sending platform. |
| Free tier | 15,000 events a month, 3 day retention. | Advantage Svix. 50,000 messages a month, 30 day retention. More than three times the volume and ten times the retention. Their free tier is better than ours by a wide margin. |
| First paid plan | Advantage ShellOrbit. $15 a month. | $490 a month. |
| Cost of 90 day retention | Advantage ShellOrbit. $99 a month. | $490 a month. |
| Price of extra events | $0.50 down to $0.30 per 1,000. | Advantage Svix. $0.0001 per message, which is $0.10 per 1,000. |
| Open source | No. Hosted only. | Advantage Svix. The server is open source under the MIT licence. |
| Compliance reports | None. | Advantage Svix. SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI-DSS. |
| Uptime commitment | 99.9 percent monthly on the $99 plan. | Advantage Svix. Higher targets available on enterprise agreements. |
| Proven at scale | Built for small production apps. No large public deployments to point at. | Advantage Svix. Runs webhook delivery for large platforms. |
| If you need both directions | You would still need something else for sending. | Advantage Svix. Sending is the strength. Ingest covers the other direction. |
Read this row first
Svix is a sending platform. If the sentence you are trying to complete is “our customers want to subscribe to events from our API”, Svix is the answer and ShellOrbit is not a candidate. Nothing below changes that.
The rest of this page is for the case where you are looking at Svix Ingest to handle inbound webhooks and wondering whether ShellOrbit does the same job for less.
Where Svix is genuinely better
The free tier is better than ours. 50,000 messages a month with 30 day retention against our 15,000 with 3 days. If you can live inside a free tier, theirs is the more generous one and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Per event cost. $0.10 per 1,000 against our $0.30 to $0.50. Three to five times cheaper once you are paying for overage.
Everything a buyer asks about. SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, an MIT licensed server, higher availability targets, and a track record at volumes we have never seen. ShellOrbit has none of that yet.
Where ShellOrbit is genuinely better
The gap between free and paid. Svix goes from $0 to $490. There is no plan in between. If you outgrow 50,000 messages and are not ready to spend $490 a month, there is nowhere to go. ShellOrbit’s next step after free is $15, then $40, then $99.
Focus on receiving. Inbound is not a second product here, it is the only product. Endpoint configuration, replay, failure alerts and the event inspector are all shaped around the case where someone else’s server is calling yours.
The honest summary
If you are sending, use Svix. If you are receiving, sitting inside 50,000 events a month, and happy on a free tier, use Svix. If you are receiving and the next step up needs to cost less than $490, that is the case ShellOrbit was built for.
Try it on your own webhooks
Free for 15,000 events a month, no card. Paid plans start at $15.