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GraphQL Playground VS JSON Server

Compare GraphQL Playground VS JSON Server and see what are their differences

GraphQL Playground logo GraphQL Playground

GraphQL IDE for better development workflows

JSON Server logo JSON Server

Get a full fake REST API with zero coding in less than 30 seconds. For front-end developers who need a quick back-end for prototyping and mocking
  • GraphQL Playground Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • JSON Server Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01

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.

JSON Server features and specs

  • Ease of Setup
    JSON Server can be set up quickly with minimal configuration, making it ideal for prototyping and rapid development. It allows developers to have a fully functioning REST API within minutes.
  • RESTful API
    It provides a standard RESTful API out of the box, allowing developers to perform all CRUD operations. This is helpful for simulating a real-world server while testing client-side applications.
  • Customization
    JSON Server supports middlewares, routes, and custom rules, allowing developers to customize the behavior and structure of the API to better suit their needs.
  • Fakes Backend Data
    It's great for simulating backend responses without needing a real backend setup, useful in front-end development to test components and interactions.
  • Lightweight
    As a lightweight server, it requires fewer resources and is quite simple compared to setting up a full-fledged backend server.

Possible disadvantages of JSON Server

  • Not for Production
    JSON Server is designed for development and testing. It is not suitable for production use due to performance limits and lack of robust security features.
  • Limited Functionality
    While JSON Server is great for basic CRUD operations, it lacks advanced features like authentication, authorization, and complex querying.
  • Data Persistence
    Data is stored in a JSON file, and while this is convenient for testing, it is not suitable for applications that require persistent and scalable data storage.
  • In-memory Limitations
    Being an in-memory server, it may have issues with handling large datasets or complex data structures efficiently.
  • Manual Data Reset
    Any changes made to the JSON file while the server is running require manual resets or reloads to reflect in the API, which can be cumbersome during continuous development cycles.

GraphQL Playground videos

Graphql playground review completa parte 1

More videos:

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

JSON Server videos

Angular CRUD with Web API Tutorial Part #3 - Setup Local JSON Server and Mock API Endpoints

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GraphQL Playground and JSON Server)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Development
0 0%
100% 100
GraphQL
100 100%
0% 0
API Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, JSON Server should be more popular than GraphQL Playground. It has been mentiond 45 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 / about 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
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JSON Server mentions (45)

  • Building a CRUD app with React Query, TypeScript, and Axios
    We'll be using json-server to create the REST API that we'll fetch data from. In the root of the project, create a db.json file with the contents. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Full Stack To Do list, a step-by-step tutorial
    Our backend will be little more than a two-way translation layer between the database and the user interface (UI). Later in this post we will identify other responsibilities of a backend but our implementation will be kept simple to demonstrate the fundamental machinery and concepts. It is worth noting the backend comes in two parts, web server and application server. Both json-server and Express are able to... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Improve Frontend-Backend development harmony with JSON-Server
    JSON-Server creates fake REST API with a minimum amount of configuration, it provides a simple way to create mock RESTful APIs and easily define the required endpoints, allows easy definition of the data schema in a JSON file and can serve as a reference for each figure in the project. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Dictionary app
    I thought about usingJson Server (hosting the repo with the words on Github to begin with), Googlesheets, or maybe Firestore (i would prefer not to use it ,to avoid extra costs just in case it gets a reasonable amount of users). It isnt a big app so I just want a simple solution for storing the words and fetching them. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Playwright - Not just for Frontend
    First, I didn't create a backend API for this example, but I used a fake API to test. I created it with json-server and json-server-auth. They are two npm packages that use a JSON file as a database and expose the database in an API. You can find more about json-server in its documentation and about json-server-auth here. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

JSON Placeholder - JSON Placeholder is a modern platform that provides you online REST API, which you can instantly use whenever you need any fake data.

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

ReqRes - A hosted REST-API ready to respond to your AJAX requests.

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

Mockae - The most flexible way to mock REST APIs with Lua code execution