Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakna | Hacker News Reader

Congrats for shipping, looks great.

It's been a while since I looked into GraphQL backends, so I'd love to know how it is different compared to Postgraphile, Hasura or Prisma.

View on HN

Thanks Dakna! I'd say that Prisma and Postgraphile both fall more into the data access layer category where you'd use them instead of other ORMs (like Sequelize). 8base and Hasura are more similar, though Hasura is focused on layering over a person's Postgres database without providing any resolvers while 8base is a fully-fledged backend-as-a-service. Like Parse for GraphQL in 2019.

PostGraphile is not an ORM, it’s a client-facing GraphQL API designed to be consumed directly from your frontend applications (web apps, mobile apps, etc). This is why it has such powerful customisation and extension features so you can use it to build the GraphQL API you want.

Benjie, I appreciate you chiming in here personally. Apologies if I oversimplified as I am not all that familiar with your product. Aside from looking at the nuances of the GraphQL engines of either product, the primary difference is that 8base is hosted and ready-to-use and PostGraphile is for someone who wants to build, deploy and manage a server application and is using Postgres. Aside from that, there are likely lots of other differences.

No problem; I saw 8base at one of the GraphQL conferences, looks cool. I agree: PostGraphile is intended for people who want to control their own servers (be that via serverless, containers, Heroku, or traditional servers).

Thanks Benjie, would love to connect with you at GraphQL Summit in San Francisco if you are attending in October. Let me know!

I’m going to be speaking at ReactiveConf in Prague, so sadly cannot make it to SF; hopefully see you at another conference though!

Best of luck, Benjie. Yes, let's connect at the next one for sure!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com