The High-Performance GraphQL Federation Platform for Mission-Critical APIs

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Grafbase is a self-hosted, Rust-powered GraphQL Federation Gateway designed for high-scale, mission-critical applications. Whether you're unifying microservices, legacy systems, or third-party APIs—Grafbase helps teams ship faster and more safely.

• Federation-first architecture — Native support for Apollo Federation v2 specification and the upcoming Composite Schemas spec
• 40% faster performance — Rust-powered engine delivers superior speed
• Extensible via WebAssembly — Customize authentication, authorization, request lifecycle, and include arbitrary APIs and data sources into your federated graph with resolver extensions
• AI-native with MCP — First GraphQL gateway with built-in Model Context Protocol server support to turn your GraphQL API into a full fledged MCP server

Grafbase delivers up to 40% faster response times vs Apollo and other gateways with lower memory usage and CPU consumption. Built in Rust for maximum efficiency.

• Advanced schema governance with the Grafbase Dashboard at app.grafbase.com, with schema checks
• Fine-grained authorization and authentication in the Gateway
• Rate limiting, operation limits, and trusted documents
• SOC 2 Type II compliant

• Self-hosted: Full control in your infrastructure
• Managed Cloud: Grafbase-hosted
• Air-gapped: Offline deployments for high-security environments

The Gateway itself is always 100% self hosted.

Connect any data source through GraphQL Federation:

• GraphQL subgraphs
• REST APIs
• gRPC services
• Databases (Postgres, Snowflake)
• Message queues (Kafka, NATS)
• Custom protocols and data sources via WebAssembly extensions

Core features

| Apollo Federation v2 | Native support for Apollo Federation v2 spec | | Rust-Powered Gateway | Ultra-low latency and memory efficiency at enterprise scale | | Extensions | Customize auth, transforms, and business logic without gateway modifications | | Schema Governance Platform | Composition checks, breaking change detection, and approval workflows with schema proposals (in the control plane) | | Branch Environments Platform | Schema versioning and branch-aware development environments (in the control plane) | | CLI & Gateway | Complete toolchain for development, deployment, and management | | MCP Integration | Built-in Model Context Protocol support to efficiently expose your GraphQL API as an MCP server with a few lines of configuration | | Observability (in the Platform) | Traces, metrics, logs, and operation analytics |

This repository contains the core open source components of Grafbase: the CLI, the Gateway and supporting libraries. See the grafbase/extensions repository for our open source extensions.

Get started quickly with Grafbase by following our getting started guide.

Explore real-world implementations and integration patterns in our examples directory:

Learn more:

• gRPC Services - Protocol Buffer service integration
• WASM Extensions - Custom authentication, authorization, resolvers and request lifecycle hooks

Grafbase supports powerful customization via WebAssembly extensions:

# Create a custom authentication extension grafbase extension init --type authentication auth-guard cd auth-guard # Build and install grafbase extension build grafbase extension install 

Extension Use Cases:

• Custom Authentication - JWT validation, API key management
• Custom Authorization- implement arbitrary authorization business logic, declaratively requiring data from the graph
• Arbitrary resolvers — plug your non-GraphQL APIs and data sources in your federated graph without writing and deploying any additional GraphQL server
• Observability Hooks - Custom logging and metrics collection
• Rate Limiting - Advanced throttling and quota management

Learn more: Extension SDK Documentation

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Grafbase consistently outperforms other GraphQL Federation gateways:

See detailed benchmarks comparing Grafbase vs Apollo vs Cosmo vs Hive in our performance analysis.

To install the Grafbase Gateway, run the following command:

curl -fsSL https://grafbase.com/downloads/gateway | bash

Hybrid Mode (Connected to Grafbase Cloud): Start the gateway in hybrid mode with the graph reference and an organization access token:

GRAFBASE_ACCESS_TOKEN=token ./grafbase-gateway \ --config grafbase.toml \ --graph-ref graph@branch

Air-gapped Mode (Fully self-contained): Start the gateway in air-gapped mode with a local schema file:

./grafbase-gateway \ --config /path/to/grafbase.toml \ --schema /path/to/federated-schema.graphql \ --listen-address 127.0.0.1:4000

Docker Deployment:

docker run -p 4000:4000 \ -v $(pwd)/grafbase.toml:/etc/grafbase.toml \ -v $(pwd)/schema.graphql:/etc/schema.graphql \ ghcr.io/grafbase/gateway:latest \ --config /etc/grafbase.toml \ --schema /etc/schema.graphql

• JWT authentication and federated authorization
• Rate limiting, operation limits, and trusted documents
• Entity caching and automatic persisted queries
• Health check endpoints and request lifecycle hooks
• OpenTelemetry integration for logs, traces, and metrics
• … and many more

Community & contributing

We welcome contributions from the community! Here's how to get involved:

• Join our Discord - Real-time community support
• Report Issues - Bug reports and feature requests
• Documentation - Comprehensive guides and API reference

1. Fork the repository and create a feature branch
2. Read our Contributing Guide - Development setup and guidelines
3. Submit a Pull Request - We review all contributions promptly
4. Join our Discord - Connect with maintainers and contributors

• Bug fixes and performance improvements
• Documentation improvements and examples
• Extensions for new data sources and protocols
• Testing and quality assurance
• Developer experience enhancements

Grafbase Gateway is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0).

• Official Documentation - Complete API reference and guides
• GraphQL Federation Guide - Learn federation concepts
• Migration from Apollo - Switch from Apollo Federation

• Grafbase CLI - Command-line interface and tooling
• Gateway Documentation - Self-hosted deployment guide
• Benchmarks & Analysis - Performance comparisons

• Website - Product information and features
• Blog - Technical insights and updates
• Changelog - Latest features and improvements
• X - News and community updates