Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

GraphQL Playground VS Graphcool

Compare GraphQL Playground VS Graphcool and see what are their differences

GraphQL Playground logo GraphQL Playground

GraphQL IDE for better development workflows

Graphcool logo Graphcool

The GraphQL backend for mobile & web developers to build better apps faster ⚡️
  • GraphQL Playground Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • Graphcool Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-16

GraphQL Playground features and specs

  • Interactive Interface
    GraphQL Playground provides a user-friendly, interactive interface for exploring and testing GraphQL queries and mutations. This allows developers to quickly experiment with their GraphQL API.
  • Auto-Completion and Syntax Highlighting
    It offers auto-completion and syntax highlighting which increases productivity by helping developers write correct GraphQL queries faster.
  • Built-in Documentation
    The built-in documentation explorer helps developers easily navigate and understand the GraphQL schemas, types, and fields available in their API.
  • Real-time Error Feedback
    Provides real-time error feedback, making it easier to identify and fix issues while writing queries, resulting in smoother development workflows.
  • Request History
    GraphQL Playground maintains a history of queries and mutations executed, allowing developers to quickly revisit and reuse previous work.
  • Customizable Settings
    It is highly customizable, allowing developers to set endpoint URLs, headers, and other configurations to match various environments (development, staging, production).

Possible disadvantages of GraphQL Playground

  • Performance
    GraphQL Playground can be resource-intensive, consuming significant amounts of memory and CPU, which might slow down the development environment, especially with large schemas.
  • Security Concerns
    As an interactive playground embedded in web interfaces, it may expose sensitive data or operations if not properly secured, necessitating careful configuration and access control.
  • Limited Offline Use
    Since it relies on an active endpoint to fetch schema details and execute queries, its utility is limited when working offline.
  • Deprecated Maintenance
    As of 2020, the GraphQL Playground repository is not actively maintained anymore, which means it may not receive updates, bug fixes, or new features.
  • Complex Configuration
    In comparison to simpler alternatives, setting up and configuring GraphQL Playground can be more complex and time-consuming.

Graphcool features and specs

  • Rapid Development
    Graphcool offers a serverless GraphQL backend which allows developers to quickly set up and deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure management.
  • Scalability
    Because it's serverless, Graphcool can easily scale to handle increased load, providing reliable performance even as your application grows.
  • Real-time Capabilities
    Graphcool provides real-time GraphQL subscriptions that allow developers to easily implement features that require real-time data updates.
  • Automated Backups
    Advanced backup features are offered, ensuring that your data is safe and can be restored when needed, enhancing data security and reliability.

Possible disadvantages of Graphcool

  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying heavily on Graphcool may lead to vendor lock-in, restricting flexibility if you wish to migrate to another platform in the future.
  • Limited Customization
    Being a managed service, there might be limitations on customizing the backend to suit very specific use cases which aren't supported out-of-the-box.
  • Learning Curve
    While there are benefits, new users might face a learning curve to fully utilize the features of Graphcool, especially those unfamiliar with GraphQL.
  • Pricing
    As with many managed services, pricing can become a concern, especially for startups or projects with limited budgets as the service scales.

GraphQL Playground videos

Graphql playground review completa parte 1

More videos:

  • Review - Create Local GraphQL Playground
  • Review - Graphql playground review completa parte 2

Graphcool videos

Review: Graphcool - GraphQL backend as a service

More videos:

  • Demo - Graphcool Framework Demo (GraphQL Backend Framework)
  • Review - #5 Intro To GraphCool UI & GraphQL - Level 2 React Native with GraphQL

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GraphQL Playground and Graphcool)
Developer Tools
53 53%
47% 47
GraphQL
69 69%
31% 31
Realtime Backend / API
63 63%
37% 37
APIs
74 74%
26% 26

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, GraphQL Playground seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 12 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

GraphQL Playground mentions (12)

  • Show HN: API Parrot – Automatically Reverse Engineer HTTP APIs"
    Have you tried something like GraphQL playground before? https://github.com/graphql/graphql-playground There's other tools out there that can generate similar docs or playgrounds, given you have a schema/spec of some type. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Exploring GraphiQL 2 Updates and New Features
    GraphiQL is a tool that was created to help developers explore GraphQL APIs, maintained by the GraphQL Foundation. But when GraphiQL became more and more popular, developers started to create additional GraphQL IDEs. A good example of this was GraphQL Playground, which quickly became the most popular GraphQL IDE. It was loosely based on GraphiQL, but had more features and a better UI. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Why Is It So Important To Go To Meetups
    I went to a GraphQL meetup and they used the gql playground and a similar schema generator to what I was using, and it made me feel relevant. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • GraphQL subscriptions at scale with NATS
    Here, we'll create a simple GraphQL server and subscribe to a subject from our resolver. We'll use GraphQL playground to mock client side behavior. Once we're connected we'll use NATS CLI to send a payload to our subject and see the changes on the client. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • GraphQL vs REST in .NET Core
    Now we can consume created GraphQL API. In the GitHub Repo same functionality has been added with REST approach and GraphQL endpoint. Also widely used Swagger configured for Web API Endpoints as well as AltairUI added for GraphQL endpoint testing. Naturally, AltairUI it not a must for GraphQL, you can also use Swagger, GraphiQL, or GraphQL Playground. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
View more

Graphcool mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Graphcool yet. Tracking of Graphcool recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GraphQL Playground and Graphcool, you can also consider the following products

How to GraphQL - Open-source tutorial website to learn GraphQL development

Prisma - Art filters using artificial intelligence to transform your photos into classic artwork.

GraphQl Editor - Editor for GraphQL that lets you draw GraphQL schemas using visual nodes

Stellate.co - Everything you need to run your GraphQL API at scale

Hasura - Hasura is an open platform to build scalable app backends, offering a built-in database, search, user-management and more.

Firebase - Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications for mobile and web.