REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC: Which API Architecture Should You Choose?

Understanding key difference between REST, GraphQL, and gRPC, three main protocols for client server communication in Microservices and web applications

Preparing for System Design Interviews? Join ByteByteGo now for a more structured preparation. They are also offering a huge 50% discount now on their lifetime plan.

Hello folks, if you are preparing for Java Developer interviews the along with Spring Boot, and Microsrvices, you should also prepare about things like REST, GraphQL, and gRPC like what is difference between REST, GraphQL, and gRPC?, which is also one of the popular questions on Java interviews.

In my last article, I shared about difference between JWT, OAuth, and SAML and in this article, I am going to share my thoughts on REST, GraphQL, and gRPC, three popular communication protocols used for building web APIs.

They are used to allow different software components to communicate with each other over a network, for example Microservices can use REST for synchronous communication between them.

Each of these protocols has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and understanding the differences between them is not just important from interview point of view but also important for choosing the right one for your project.

In this article, you will learn about the differences between REST, GraphQL, and gRPC. I will explain the core concepts behind each protocol, their strengths and weaknesses, and provide some use cases for when to use each one.

By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of which protocol is best suited for your project’s requirements.

By the way, If you are preparing for System design interviews and want to learn System Design in-depth then you can also check out sites like ByteByteGo, Codemia.io, Design Guru, Exponent, Educative, Bugfree.ai, and Udemy which have many great System design courses.

We will first start with some introduction then we will deep dive into each of them and then again revisit the difference so that you have clear understanding of their strength and weakness and when to use them.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer and it is a popular protocol used for creating web services that expose data and functionality over HTTP. It is based on HTTP protocol and a set of constraints that define how resources are identified and addressed, and how operations can be performed on those resources.

On the other hand, GraphQL is a query language for APIs that was developed by Facebook. It allows clients to specify exactly what data they need, and the server responds with only that data.

GraphQL was created to address shortcomings and limitation of REST, hence it provides a more flexible and efficient way of fetching data from a server, as clients can request multiple resources in a single request.

And, gRPC is a high-performance, open-source protocol used for creating APIs. It uses Google’s Protocol Buffers as a data format and provides support for streaming and bi-directional communication. gRPC is often used in microservice architectures because of its performance and support for multiple programming languages.

Now that we know what they are let’s deep dive into each of them.

What is REST? When to use it?

As I said, REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing distributed applications, particularly web-based APIs.

RESTful APIs use HTTP methods (such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on resources identified by a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

If you know HTTP you know REST.

REST also relies on a stateless client-server architecture, where each request from the client contains all the information necessary for the server to fulfill the request, without needing to maintain session state.

Here are some scenarios when REST is a good choice: