GraphQL vs REST

Both REST and GraphQL have their own unique advantages which capitalize on the drawbacks of the other.

Benefits of GraphQL

3 benefits of GraphQL:

Faster performance

GraphQL can speed up development and automation in comparison to REST. GraphQL queries themselves are not faster than REST queries, but because you can pick the fields you want to query, GraphQL requests will always be smaller and more efficient.

This is unlike REST, where additional data is often returned, even when that data isn’t vital or necessary. GraphQL also enables developers to retrieve multiple entities in one request, further adding to each query’s efficiency.

Longer API call limit threshold

Since REST returns all of the data from an endpoint once queries are made, there are instances when the API request limit is hit. When this happens, no data is returned from the query request, resulting in a paused application and potential software downtime.

GraphQL, on the other hand, doesn’t encounter call limits as quickly since it uses fewer queries and only returns what the client asked for specifically.

Less time weeding through data

As previously mentioned, it’s common for REST to return too much data following a query request. By only returning the specified data set, developers can spend less time going through excess data to find the result they were looking for with GraphQL, and more time on things that move the needle.

Let’s show this through an example. We’ll query a REST & GraphQL API to get the description for a GitHub repository.

(REST API response)
 

Using REST we are able to get the description however it returns 100+ lines of other data we don’t need.

(GraphQL API response)

However, when using GraphQL we can just get the data which we need. There is no need to filter through the data response.