Apollo GraphQL
By Apollo GraphQL, Inc.
Apollo GraphQL is a platform of tools and services for building, querying, and managing GraphQL APIs across the client and server, including Apollo Client, Apollo Server, and a schema registry for coordinating APIs at scale.
Definition
Apollo GraphQL is a platform of tools and services for building, querying, and managing GraphQL APIs across the client and server, including Apollo Client, Apollo Server, and a schema registry for coordinating APIs at scale.
Overview
Apollo grew out of Meteor Development Group, the team behind the Meteor.js framework, as GraphQL — originally developed and open-sourced by Facebook — gained traction as an alternative to REST for client-driven data fetching. Apollo focused on building the tooling layer that made GraphQL practical for production teams on both the client and server. On the client side, Apollo Client provides data fetching, normalized caching, and state management for frontend frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular, so components can declare exactly the data they need. On the server side, Apollo Server offers a spec-compliant GraphQL runtime commonly paired with Node.js and Express.js. Apollo's federation architecture lets organizations compose many independently owned GraphQL services into one unified "supergraph," which is especially useful for large companies running GraphQL across multiple microservice teams — an alternative approach to auto-generating GraphQL directly from a database, as tools like Hasura do. Apollo's platform layer, now branded GraphOS, adds a schema registry, usage metrics, and safety checks that flag breaking schema changes before they ship. Apollo is widely regarded as the most complete and widely adopted toolchain for production GraphQL, particularly in organizations running federated APIs across multiple teams.
Key Features
- Apollo Client with normalized, framework-agnostic caching
- Apollo Server for building spec-compliant GraphQL backends
- Apollo Federation for composing multiple services into one supergraph
- GraphOS schema registry with breaking-change detection
- First-class integrations with React, Vue, Angular, and Node.js
- Real-time data support via GraphQL subscriptions
- Developer tooling including CLI and IDE extensions