Are there any disadvantages to GraphQL?

Question

All the articles about GraphQL will tell you how wonderful it is, but are there any disadvantages or shortcomings to it? Thank you.

Answer 1

Disadvantages:

• You need to learn how to set up GraphQL. The ecosystem is still rapidly evolving so you have to keep up.
• You need to send the queries from the client, you can just send strings but if you want more comfort and caching you'll use a client library -> extra code in your client
• You need to define the schema beforehand => extra work before you get results
• You need to have a graphql endpoint on your server => new libraries that you don't know yet
• Graphql queries are more bytes than simply going to a REST endpoint
• The server needs to do more processing to parse the query and verify the parameters

But, those are more than countered by these:

• GraphQL is not that hard to learn
• The extra code is only a few KB
• By defining a schema, you will prevent much more work afterwards fixing bugs and enduring hairy upgrades
• There are a lot of people switching to GraphQL so there is a rich ecosystem developing, with excellent tooling
• When using persistent queries in production (replacing GraphQL queries with simply an ID and parameters), you actually send less bytes than with REST
• The extra processing for incoming queries is negligible
• Providing a clean decoupling of API and backend allows for much faster iteration on backend improvenments