Which is better for your project: GraphQL vs REST

It can be hard to decide which technologies to use in your next project’s “tech stack.” In many cases, and especially when deciding between GraphQL and RESTful APIs, it’s all about picking the next best API design architecture.

APIs can be built in four important ways: SOAP, GRPC, REST, and GraphQL. When we want to build APIs, we usually only think about REST and GraphQL. This is because SOAP and GRPC, the old ways of building APIs, were changed by REST.

Table of Contents

GraphQL’s Good Points

Here are a few reasons why GraphQL is more than enough to build the next app that makes a billion dollars.

Getting Information from a Single API Endpoint
GraphQL’s best feature is that it lets you access any data points through a single API endpoint.
One of the most common issues with RESTful APIs is that there are too many access points. There is only one endpoint in GraphQL, so you don’t have to send multiple requests to get different information about an object.

You can see that the GraphQL server only has one endpoint to access the resource, while the RESTful API needs multiple endpoints to access different resources.

There will be no over- or under-fetching.

With RESTful APIs, the problem of too much or too little fetching is well known. This happens when clients download data by hitting endpoints that return fixed data structures, or when they get more or less than they expected.

Over-fetching happens when a request gets more data than it needs. This is called “fetching” more data than it needs. Imagine that you are getting all the users into a table so that you can put their usernames on your homepage. In that case, over-fetching will bring back all the information about each user, not just the name.

Complex systems and microservices will be handled better.

GraphQL can bring together and hide the complexity of multiple systems that work together.

For example, let’s say we want to switch from a monolithic backend application to a microservice architecture. By putting all of the microservices into one GraphQL schema, the GraphQL API makes it easier for them to talk to each other.

Once these schemas are set up, the front end and the back end can talk to each other without making any more changes. This is because the front end knows that the data in the schema will always be the same across the system.

Quick and Safe

The problem of over-fetching can cause clients to use more bandwidth, which could slow down your application over time. When you use RESTful API design patterns, it takes more time to sort through a huge payload to find the information you need.

Because GraphQL can avoid over-fetching and under-fetching, the server returns a secure, easy-to-read, and predictable shape. This makes your API requests and responses faster.

The Pros of REST

REST is still one of the most popular API standards, even though GraphQL is becoming more popular. Let’s look into why.

Learning Curve: It’s easiest to learn and understand RESTful APIs. This is the main thing that makes it better than other APIs.
Serialization: Serializing data in JSON can be done in several ways and formats with REST.
Caching: An HTTP proxy server and cache can help REST API handle a lot of traffic.
Complex Request: Different requests have their endpoint in REST APIs, which makes it easier to handle complex requests than in other APIs.
Simple and clean: REST APIs are elegant, simple, and easy to use. They are easy to get around in.
Standard HTTP Procedures: To get data and make requests, REST uses call-outs to standard HTTP procedures.
Client/Server: Business logic is separate from how it looks. So if you change one, it won’t affect the other.
REST: It is stateless, which means that all the messages sent between the client and the server contain all the information needed to know what to do with the message.

REST vs. GraphQL: A Showdown

Last, we’ll look at the biggest difference between GraphQL APIs and RESTful APIs. Then, we’ll talk about what makes a good API design and compare how each technology handles those features.

Performance

There’s no doubt that GraphQL is faster than RESTful APIs because it lets you access all of your resources from a single point. RESTful APIs have more than one endpoint, which could slow down the network.

Search for Complexity

Since GraphQL endpoints are not split into multiple endpoints, queries can get more complicated over time. On the other hand, RESTful API endpoints are separate, which means that RESTful APIs can only be used for simple queries.

Popularity and Support from the Community

GraphQL is a growing query language and pattern for APIs. Even though it’s still new, the number of people using it and the number of resources available for it is growing quickly, and there are already a lot of ways to learn it for yourself.

REST, on the other hand, has a large community behind it and is still used by a wide range of companies, from those making small microservices to those making complex social apps and more.

At the moment, GraphQL and REST are both used by a lot of people. Both technologies are still widely used and have a lot of support from developers.

Curve of Learning

GraphQL is hard to understand at first. It takes a good understanding of API development and software engineering in general. A person who has never used GraphQL before will have a hard time understanding it well enough to build a complicated app.

On the other hand, REST is easy to start with and doesn’t require as much domain knowledge right away. RESTful API works well with most of the most popular programming languages and frameworks. This makes it easy to learn.

Summary

GraphQL is a new technology that follows in the footsteps of RESTful API architectural patterns, just as REST was created to solve problems with SOAP API patterns.

GraphQL gives you faster responses, a single API endpoint for all your queries, and a strict schema for consistent data access. Because of these reasons, even when GraphQL was still new, multi-billion-dollar companies began to switch to it. But despite its flaws, REST, which came before GraphQL, still has a strong presence on the stage.