47 engineers on Hacker News describe using GraphQL first-hand: 16 endorse it, 8 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“our team supports ... a couple of GraphQL based ones ... GraphQL has its use cases, but it is often times overused”
mixed · production · erkok · 2025-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“avoid REST or GraphQL endpoints by default, which was the main source of frontend overhead before RSC.”
regret · production · berekuk · 2025-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“introduced the exact split-stack complexity (GraphQL overhead, context switching) LiveView promises to fix”
regret · production · ryanrasti · 2025-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Sometime in 2022 we switched back to REST endpoints... switching to REST was the right call.”
regret · production · peterldowns · 2024-05-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd rather make lambdas that talk to the data store directly and output HTML than make and maintain a GraphQL schema manually again.”
regret · production · ttfkam · 2024-05-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to GraphQL a year and a half ago or so, but this piece of data seems to suggest that we might have been better off”
regret · production · 1.5 yr · djha-skin · 2023-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use GraphQL a lot for static content... GraphQL should not be used at runtime to do these dynamic magic queries”
mixed · production · AtNightWeCode · 2022-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm more confident in our GraphQL backed headless stores than any of our Shopify themes in terms of maintenance and ease of updating.”
endorse · production · interstice · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Thanks for the graphQL end point, it's been very helpful!”
endorse · production · taylorfinley · 2022-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was nice to have one language and GraphQL was very useful.”
endorse · production · indymike · 2022-06-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We really disliked this part of Gatsby, but I know some people really like it.”
regret · production · steve_adams_86 · 2021-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use GraphQL for internal communication between a few microservices because we need the flexibility”
endorse · production · tsimionescu · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I introduced graphql a few months ago to basically unblock myself from having to think about and design gazillions of custom REST endpoints”
endorse · production · 0.5 yr · jillesvangurp · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But we already solved a big part of the problem.”
endorse · production · valenterry · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've not used Graphql in production. When I was researching it's ecosystem anything outside of JS leaved a bit to be desired. That being said. It's a solution to a problem.”
mixed · personal · soulnothing · 2019-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“GraphQL is cool, but actually maintaining it is a nightmare”
regret · production · lwansbrough · 2019-07-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“All of our user-facing api is written in GraphQL, (and yes, it's been amazing).”
endorse · production · keremkazan · 2018-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are running it in production for a long time”
endorse · production · avitzurel · 2018-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my rule of thumb was that as long as the query representing an entire screen could typically return in sub 100ms in production, it was acceptable”
endorse · production · andrewingram · 2018-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In both cases (gRPC and GraphQL) we've run into so many issues that the technology was abandoned and we fell back to plain JSON REST.”
regret · production · bcheung · 2018-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we moved to GraphQL it solved a lot of the administrative and philosophical headaches... Highly recommmend GraphQL to anyone.”
endorse · production · ilovecaching · 2018-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using GraphQL in the last six months. I've found it be to very powerful and has made the web app development a pleasure.”
endorse · personal · 0.5 yr · Blackstone4 · 2017-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have been using GraphQL for almost a year now and I'm really pleased with it.”
endorse · production · 1 yr · filleokus · 2017-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using something similar and it solves many problems elegantly.”
endorse · production · whatever_dude · 2017-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our API ... entirely via GraphQL over quite a lot of postgres tables and this has remained very performant for us.”
endorse · production · benwilson-512 · 2017-07-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“GraphQL gives us a layer of abstraction to create consistency from the point of view of client apps while allowing iteration of backend services.”
endorse · production · leebyron · 2017-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Granted I'm using GraphQL but I'd prefer it regardless.”
endorse · production · scottmf · 2017-03-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I work both on a pretty much bog-standard web (GraphQL) backend and the frontend that uses it.”
neutral · production · dminik · 2026-07-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our service didn't handle that annotation in any special way. I added observability to flag if any deprecated functions have been called”
neutral · production · Powdering7082 · 2024-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We tried GraphQL for about a year, then switched back to REST, but took the important bits with us”
neutral · production · 1 yr · cellularmitosis · 2024-05-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched from GraphQl to regular REST at $work but decided to drop it”
neutral · production · emi2k01 · 2024-03-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“every project I've been on in the past 4-5 years has used GraphQL”
neutral · production · 4 yr · bryanrasmussen · 2024-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the front end sends a graphql mutation to a back end saga and gets back a transaction id”
neutral · production · pault · 2021-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we basically just have a normal Express app serving GraphQL.”
neutral · production · hn_throwaway_99 · 2021-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Read how we migrated our internal API at toptal from a slow REST-based to a performant GraphQL one.”
neutral · production · mrzasa · 2021-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A tiny bit of our GraphQL schema is _already_ running in production atop new services”
neutral · production · dangoor · 2019-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a small piece of our GraphQL schema is already in Go running in production.”
neutral · production · dangoor · 2019-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated a webflow site to Next.js/GraphQL/Contentful/Hasura stack.”
neutral · production · zed88 · 2019-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“validate it doesn't break backwards compatibility with existing client-side code”
neutral · production · ndonnellan · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The solution we use at work is to put all of the GraphQL strings in separate .graphql.ts files.”
neutral · production · mwilliamson · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I did some graphql personally, but nothing that ever ended up in production.”
neutral · personal · jaabe · 2018-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I speak as an early adopter who has used graphQL in production.”
neutral · production · dbdjfjrjvebd · 2018-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have an authenticated GraphQL API”
neutral · production · danpalmer · 2018-08-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Once it's in graphql you can just use the interactive graphql endpoint which has autocomplete and documentation”
neutral · personal · zawerf · 2018-04-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Lambda for our event processing pipeline and also for our GraphQL API consumed by our clients”
neutral · production · leetbulb · 2017-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I introduced GraphQL and Relay into our stack so was biased towards Relay”
neutral · production · 2 yr · e1g · 2017-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use that model at my company. ... GraphQL doesn't mean moving to stateful components”
neutral · production · lsdafjklsd · 2015-08-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?