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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Microframeworks
  4. Microframeworks
  5. GraphQL vs Sails.js

GraphQL vs Sails.js

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Sails.js
Sails.js
Stacks337
Followers511
Votes296
GitHub Stars22.9K
Forks1.9K
GraphQL
GraphQL
Stacks34.9K
Followers28.1K
Votes309

GraphQL vs Sails.js: What are the differences?

What is GraphQL? A data query language and runtime. GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

What is Sails.js? Realtime MVC Framework for Node.js. Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

GraphQL can be classified as a tool in the "Query Languages" category, while Sails.js is grouped under "Microframeworks (Backend)".

"Schemas defined by the requests made by the user" is the top reason why over 61 developers like GraphQL, while over 41 developers mention "Data-driven apis " as the leading cause for choosing Sails.js.

GraphQL and Sails.js are both open source tools. It seems that Sails.js with 20.6K GitHub stars and 1.85K forks on GitHub has more adoption than GraphQL with 11.7K GitHub stars and 752 GitHub forks.

Twitter, Intuit, and Yelp are some of the popular companies that use GraphQL, whereas Sails.js is used by TestLegends, HYPH, and Giguana. GraphQL has a broader approval, being mentioned in 541 company stacks & 716 developers stacks; compared to Sails.js, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.

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Advice on Sails.js, GraphQL

Raj
Raj

Oct 10, 2020

Review

It purely depends on your app needs. Does it need to be scalable, do you have lots of features, OR it is a simple project with very simple needs - many of those parameters clarify which technologies will fit.

If you are looking for a quick solution, that reduces lot of development time, take a look at postgraphile (https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/). You have to just define the schema and you get the entire graph-ql apis built for you and you can just focus on your frontend.

On frontend, React is good, but also need to remember that it is popular because it introduced one way data writes and in-built virtual dom + diffing to determine which dom to modify. Though personally I liked it, am recently more inclined to Svelte because its lightweightedness and absence of virtual dom and its simplicity compared to the huge ecosystem that React has surrounded itself with.

In all situations, frameworks keep changing over time. What is best today is not considered even good few years from now. What is important is to have the logic in a separate, clean manner void of too many framework related dependencies - that way you can switch one framework with another very easily.

3.77k views3.77k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sails.js
Sails.js
GraphQL
GraphQL

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

-
Hierarchical;Product-centric;Client-specified queries;Backwards Compatible;Structured, Arbitrary Code;Application-Layer Protocol;Strongly-typed;Introspective
Statistics
GitHub Stars
22.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
1.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
337
Stacks
34.9K
Followers
511
Followers
28.1K
Votes
296
Votes
309
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 49
    Data-driven apis
  • 47
    Waterline ORM
  • 37
    Mvc
  • 32
    Easy rest
  • 25
    Real-time
Cons
  • 5
    Waterline ORM
  • 4
    Defaults to VueJS
  • 0
    Standard MVC
Pros
  • 75
    Schemas defined by the requests made by the user
  • 63
    Will replace RESTful interfaces
  • 62
    The future of API's
  • 49
    The future of databases
  • 12
    Self-documenting
Cons
  • 4
    More code to type.
  • 4
    Hard to migrate from GraphQL to another technology
  • 2
    Takes longer to build compared to schemaless.
  • 1
    Works just like any other API at runtime
  • 1
    No support for caching
Integrations
Grunt
Grunt
Node.js
Node.js
MySQL
MySQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
MongoDB
Socket.IO
Socket.IO
ExpressJS
ExpressJS
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sails.js, GraphQL?

ExpressJS

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sinatra

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Lumen

Lumen

Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

Slim

Slim

Slim is easy to use for both beginners and professionals. Slim favors cleanliness over terseness and common cases over edge cases. Its interface is simple, intuitive, and extensively documented — both online and in the code itself.

Fastify

Fastify

Fastify is a web framework highly focused on speed and low overhead. It is inspired from Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town. Use Fastify can increase your throughput up to 100%.

Falcon

Falcon

Falcon is a minimalist WSGI library for building speedy web APIs and app backends. We like to think of Falcon as the Dieter Rams of web frameworks.

hapi

hapi

hapi is a simple to use configuration-centric framework with built-in support for input validation, caching, authentication, and other essential facilities for building web applications and services.

TypeORM

TypeORM

It supports both Active Record and Data Mapper patterns, unlike all other JavaScript ORMs currently in existence, which means you can write high quality, loosely coupled, scalable, maintainable applications the most productive way.

FeathersJS

FeathersJS

Feathers is a real-time, micro-service web framework for NodeJS that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.

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