Webhooks and connectors help to connect the web services to channels and teams in Microsoft Teams. Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callback that notifies users about any action that has taken place in the Teams channel. It's a way for an app to get real-time data. Connectors allow users to subscribe to receive notifications and messages from your web services. They expose an HTTPS endpoint for your service to post messages in the form of cards.

Important

You can choose to build notification bot Teams app other than Incoming Webhooks. They perform similarly but notification bot has more functionalities. For more information, see Build notification bot with JavaScript or Incoming Webhook notification sample. To get started, download and explore Teams Toolkit. For more information, see Teams Toolkit documents.

Webhooks help Teams to integrate with external apps. With Outgoing Webhooks, you can send text messages from a channel to a web service. After configuring the Outgoing Webhooks, users can @mention Outgoing Webhook and send a message to a web service. The service responds within 10 seconds to the message with a text or a card.

Note

Outgoing Webhooks are configured on a per team basis and cannot be included as part of a normal Teams app.

Connectors allow users to subscribe to receive notifications and messages from the web services. They expose the HTTPS endpoint for the service to post messages to Teams channels, typically in the form of cards.

Incoming Webhooks help in posting messages from apps to Teams. If Incoming Webhooks are enabled for a team in any channel, it exposes the HTTPS endpoint, that accepts correctly formatted JSON and inserts the messages to that channel. For example, you can create an Incoming Webhook in your DevOps channel, configure your build, and simultaneously deploy and monitor services to send alerts.

Before you start to learn how to build Incoming Webhooks, you may also want to know that you can build a notification bot using Teams Toolkit. Notification bots can enable more customizable experience to meet different business scenarios.

Learn more about the differences between a notification bot and Incoming Webhook so that you can choose the right solutions for your scenarios:

Connectors for Microsoft 365 Groups allow you to create a custom configuration page for your Incoming Webhook and package them as part of a Teams app. You send messages primarily using connector cards for Microsoft 365 Groups and can add a limited set of card actions to them. For example, a weather connector that allows users to select a location and any time of the day, to receive updates about tomorrow's weather. They're configured at channel level but are installed at team level.

Note

You can distribute the connector for Microsoft 365 Groups Teams app to our AppStore.

Actionable messages allow users to take action without leaving their email client, increasing user engagement. With Microsoft 365 and Incoming Webhooks, you can send messages by posting a JSON payload to the webhook URL.

Create Outgoing Webhooks