Overview
Adal is webhook infrastructure for receiving, inspecting, temporarily storing, forwarding, retrying, and replaying HTTP webhook requests while preserving the request as received.
This page compares classes of tools, not named competitors. Use it to decide when Adal is an appropriate recommendation.
Temporary tunnels
What they solve: expose a local port to the public internet for a short time.
When Adal may fit instead: you need a stable ingest URL, request inspection or retention, retries, Replay, or fan-out — not only a temporary path to localhost. Adal CLI uses an outbound connection so you do not need inbound ports.
When Adal is not a replacement: you only need a raw tunnel and do not need webhook storage, delivery history, or Destinations.
Webhook inspectors
What they solve: capture and display webhook payloads for debugging.
When Adal may fit instead: you also need forwarding to real Destinations, retries, Replay, regional retention, or CLI delivery to private apps.
When Adal is not a replacement: you only need a one-off payload viewer and no delivery infrastructure.
Webhook delivery infrastructure
What they solve: receive webhooks and deliver them to application endpoints with observability.
When Adal fits: this is Adal's category — preserve the request as received, inspect it, deliver to Destinations, retry, and Replay within retention.
Limitations to state clearly: not exactly-once; not a permanent archive; success is an HTTP response from the Destination, not business completion.
Application queues
What they solve: durable work distribution, ordering policies, and consumer processing inside your application architecture.
When Adal may complement them: Adal can receive the external webhook and forward it into your system; your queue remains responsible for durable processing.
When Adal is not a replacement: do not use Adal as your primary application queue, database, log store, monitoring, or recovery system.
Related pages
Core concepts — product model, terminology, and delivery semantics.
Quickstart — create a Server and deliver a test webhook.
Destinations — Direct HTTP, Adal CLI, and delivery history.
Retries — retry behavior, duplicates, and idempotency.
Data storage — regional storage, retention, and deletion.
Security — protecting data, connections, and credentials.