GraphQL APIs draw a natural comparison and contrast to RESTful APIs. I should mention in the very beginning there are benefits to both approaches. Don’t force adopt GraphQL when REST makes more sense. Even if you do decide to go with GraphQL APIs, be sure to continue REST-based best practices. For example, optimize for reusability.

A core distinction of GraphQL is it is optimized for performance and flexibility. A big part of this is instead of returning a complete dataset, GraphQL allows you to tailor the request to just give you the data you need. This is a notable change from RESTful APIs since REST endpoints don’t allow you to tailor the data that is returned. Another advantage is operations that would require multiple RESTful API calls can be simplified to a single GraphQL API call.

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