# Event Grid vs Event Hubs

> One is a doorbell. The other is a tape you can rewind.

- **Format:** short video, 10 steps, ~32 seconds
- **Topic:** Event Grid or Event Hubs — the mechanism difference behind two Azure services people confuse because both say "event".
- **Author:** Suthahar Jegatheesan (MSDEVBUILD)
- **Category:** Azure · Azure
- **Published:** 2026-05-22
- **Tags:** azure, azureeventgrid, azureeventhubs, eventgrid, eventhubs, eventdrivenarchitecture, systemdesign, microsoftazure, azurecloud, cloudarchitecture, dataengineering, az305, msdevbuild
- **Canonical URL:** https://blog.msdevbuild.com/shorts/azure-event-grid-vs-event-hubs/

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## What you'll learn

- The doorbell-or-tape question that settles which one you need
- Push with retries versus pull with offsets and retention
- Why a real pipeline usually ends up using both

## Understand it one step at a time

### 1. Both say event. Not the same

Same word in both service names, two completely different jobs underneath — and picking wrong shows up months later, not on day one.

### 2. A doorbell and a tape

Event Grid is a doorbell — it rings each subscriber once and its job is done. Event Hubs is a tape — it keeps every recording and can be rewound.

### 3. One thing, or a stream?

“Order placed” is a discrete fact that matters entirely on its own. “Driver moved” only means anything as part of a continuous series.

### 4. Push, or pull?

Event Grid pushes — it calls your HTTP handler and expects a 200 back. Event Hubs just sits there while your consumer reads at its own pace.

### 5. Does anyone read it twice?

A Grid event is delivered once and gone for good. A Hubs event stays inside the retention window, readable by anyone who asks again.

### 6. Who retries — them or you?

Event Grid retries a failed delivery itself with exponential backoff and can dead-letter it. Event Hubs never retries anything — that's on your consumer.

### 7. How many per second?

Discrete business events like OrderPlaced arrive in the hundreds per second. Telemetry and IoT data arrive in the millions, batched by partition.

### 8. Usually you need both

Event Hubs Capture writes a file to Blob Storage automatically, that write raises a BlobCreated event on Event Grid, and a Function reacts. One pipeline, both services.

### 9. The whole difference in one frame

Five rows: push vs pull, once vs replayable, hundreds vs millions, who retries, and what each one actually models. Save this one for interviews.

### 10. Doorbell, or tape?

Ask yourself that one doorbell-or-tape question and you'll never confuse Event Grid with Event Hubs again — in a design or an interview.

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## The takeaway

**One announces. The other remembers.**

If somebody might need it again, you needed the log, not the doorbell.