federation VS apollo-server

Compare federation vs apollo-server and see what are their differences.

federation

šŸŒ Ā Build and scale a single data graph across multiple services with Apollo's federation gateway. (by apollographql)

apollo-server

šŸŒ Ā Spec-compliant and production ready JavaScript GraphQL server that lets you develop in a schema-first way. Built for Express, Connect, Hapi, Koa, and more. (by apollographql)
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federation apollo-server
3 66
647 13,670
0.8% 0.2%
9.4 9.1
about 23 hours ago about 22 hours ago
TypeScript TypeScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

federation

Posts with mentions or reviews of federation. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-07-29.
  • Apollo Federation Custom Scalars
    1 project | /r/graphql | 9 Apr 2023
    I feel like we ran into this recently at work but not with custom scalars etc. My colleague raised an issue for it. Hope this helps in some way.
  • Apollo Federation Input type union merge
    1 project | /r/graphql | 5 Oct 2022
    as per the Github issue here. However I have trouble understanding this statement. Why can't the gateway pick and choose which input fields are routed to each subgraph? Isn't it the responsibility of the supergraph SDL and the gateway to do exactly this, this same way it does for entities? What limitations are there that make merging input types using the union strategy not viable?
  • The Stack #3
    22 projects | dev.to | 29 Jul 2021
    Federation comes with its own specification and directives as part of it which helps people to define all of the relations between multiple GraphQL entities so that the Apollo Gateway can combine them all together without having to modify the GraphQL gateway and also functions like __resolveReference which helps in resolving an entity with its reference as specified by the directives.

apollo-server

Posts with mentions or reviews of apollo-server. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-16.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing federation and apollo-server you can also consider the following projects:

jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

mercurius - Implement GraphQL servers and gateways with Fastify

graphql-mesh - The Graph of Everything - Federated architecture for any API service

graphql-live-query - Realtime GraphQL Live Queries with JavaScript

nestjs-graphql - GraphQL (TypeScript) module for Nest framework (node.js) šŸ·

supergraph-demo - šŸæ Compose subgraphs into a Federation v1 supergraph at build-time with static composition to power a federated graph router at runtime.

graphql-yoga - šŸ§˜ Rewrite of a fully-featured GraphQL Server with focus on easy setup, performance & great developer experience. The core of Yoga implements WHATWG Fetch API and can run/deploy on any JS environment.

graphql-editor - šŸ“ŗ Visual Editor & GraphQL IDE.

express-graphql - Create a GraphQL HTTP server with Express.

subscriptions-transport-ws - :arrows_clockwise: A WebSocket client + server for GraphQL subscriptions

graphql-ws - Coherent, zero-dependency, lazy, simple, GraphQL over WebSocket Protocol compliant server and client.