Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

GraphQL VS Ably

Compare GraphQL VS Ably and see what are their differences

GraphQL logo GraphQL

GraphQL is a data query language and runtime to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps.

Ably logo Ably

Serious realtime infrastructure
  • GraphQL Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01
  • Ably Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-23

Ably is an enterprise-ready pub/sub messaging platform. We make it easy to efficiently design, quickly ship, and seamlessly scale critical realtime functionality delivered directly to end-users. Everyday we deliver billions of realtime messages to millions of users for thousands of companies.

We power the apps people, organizations, and enterprises depend on everyday like Lightspeed System’s realtime device management platform for over seven million school-owned devices, Vitac’s live captioning for 100s of millions of multilingual viewers for events like the Olympic Games, and Split’s realtime feature flagging for one trillion feature flags per month.

We’re the only pub/sub platform with a suite of integrated services to build complete realtime functionality like showing a driver’s live GPS location on a home-delivery app, instantly loading the most recent score when opening a sports app, while automatically handling reconnection when swapping networks. We guarantee low latency delivery of all messages to subscribers over a secure, reliable, and highly available global edge network.

Developers from startups to industrial giants choose to build on Ably to simplify engineering, minimize DevOps overhead, and increase development velocity.

GraphQL videos

REST vs. GraphQL: Critical Look

More videos:

  • Review - REST vs GraphQL - What's the best kind of API?
  • Review - What Is GraphQL?

Ably videos

How to build a collaborative environment around your product

More videos:

  • Demo - How to build an avatar stack with Ably Spaces
  • Demo - Ably 101: Serverless WebSockets at scale

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GraphQL and Ably)
Developer Tools
72 72%
28% 28
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
Mobile Push Messaging
0 0%
100% 100
JavaScript Framework
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, GraphQL seems to be a lot more popular than Ably. While we know about 225 links to GraphQL, we've tracked only 20 mentions of Ably. 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 mentions (225)

  • Difference between GraphQL, REST, and gRPC
    On the other hand, GraphQL is a query language for APIs that was developed by Facebook. It allows clients to specify exactly what data they need, and the server responds with only that data. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • When It’s Time to Give REST a Rest
    In this article, I’ll show why GraphQL is the preferred approach over a RESTful API here, demonstrating how to deploy Apollo Server (and Apollo Explorer) to get up and running quickly with GraphQL. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
  • Building Scalable GraphQL Microservices With Node.js and Docker: A Comprehensive Guide
    GraphQL is a query language and runtime for APIs. It provides a flexible and efficient way for clients to request and retrieve specific data from a server using a single API endpoint. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Type-Safe Fetch with Next.js, Strapi, and OpenAPI
    When you use technologies like GraphQL, it is trivial to derive TypeScript types. A GraphQL API is created by implementing a schema. Generating the TypeScript type definitions from this schema is simple, and you do not have to do any more work than just making the GraphQL API. This is one reason why I like GraphQL so much. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • REST vs. GraphQL: A Detailed Comparison of API Architectures for Developers
    REST and GraphQL have advantages, drawbacks, and use cases for different environments. REST is for simple logic and a more structured architecture, while GraphQL is for a more tailored response and flexible request. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

Ably mentions (20)

  • Essential guide to WebSocket authentication
    Of course, if this all sounds like a headache, you might consider Ably. Apart from solving the authentication problem, Ably provides additional features you’d need to implement on top of WebSockets like Presence and message queues, and provides production guarantees that will be time-consuming or costly to achieve on your own like 99.999% uptime guarantee, exactly-once delivery, and guaranteed message ordering. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • The top real-time notification services for building in-app notifications
    Ably is a robust real-time data delivery platform based on WebSockets with features like message ordering, presence, and connection recovery. Customers include Toyota, HubSpot, and Verizon. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Serverless WebSockets with Ably
    I reached for Ably because they had a booth at the 2022 Jamstack Conf, and probably gave me a sticker or something. (You hear that? Sponsor your local tech conference!) They have a generous free tier, which is an absolute requirement for this space, where devs like me usually want to try a product on something that doesn't make us any money, and then that translates (ideally) into recommending it in our... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Cursor Everywhere: An experiment on shared cursors for every website
    A realtime protocol like WebSockets seemed like a logical way to share real-time updates of cursor positions. Working at Ably, it was a no-brainer to use it as my WebSocket-based pub/sub broker. A pub/sub broker simplifies many aspects of projects like this, often coming with built-in features that speed up development. For instance, I wanted each browser's cursor position to be continually available to other... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Laravel Realtime with Ably & Laravel Livewire
    So let's get started. Firs thing to do is to create an account in Ably, so head there and create your account. Then, you have to create an application, give it a name, and we are good to go. The next thing to do, is to grab the API key. From the Ably dashboard, head to API Keys, you will find 2 keys, we are interested in the first one. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

gRPC - Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Service Discovery

Pusher - Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps.

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps

PubNub - PubNub is a real-time messaging system for web and mobile apps that can handle API for all platforms and push messages to any device anywhere in the world in a fraction of a second without having to worry about proxies, firewalls or mobile drop-offs.

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)