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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Realtime Backend API
  5. Apollo vs Horizon

Apollo vs Horizon

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Horizon
Horizon
Stacks22
Followers56
Votes0
GitHub Stars6.8K
Forks348
Apollo
Apollo
Stacks2.7K
Followers1.8K
Votes25

Apollo vs Horizon: What are the differences?

Developers describe Apollo as "GraphQL server for Express, Connect, Hapi, Koa and more". Build a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing REST APIs, so you can ship new application features fast without waiting on backend changes. On the other hand, Horizon is detailed as "*A realtime, open-source JavaScript back end from RethinkDB *". Horizon provides a complete backend that makes it dramatically simpler to build, deploy, manage, and scale engaging JavaScript web and mobile apps. Horizon is extensible, integrates with the Node.js stack, and allows building modern, arbitrarily complex applications.

Apollo belongs to "Platform as a Service" category of the tech stack, while Horizon can be primarily classified under "Realtime Backend / API".

Apollo and Horizon are both open source tools. Apollo with 7.53K GitHub stars and 935 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Horizon with 6.77K GitHub stars and 389 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Horizon, Apollo

Márton
Márton

CTO at Media4Care

Aug 31, 2020

Decided

We wanted to save as much time as possible when writing our back-end, therefore Apollo was out of the question, we went for an auto-generated API instead. Hasura looked good in the beginning, but we wanted to retain the ability to add a few manual resolvers and modifications to auto-generated ones, which ruled out Hasura. Postgraphile with its Plug-In architecture was the right choice for us, we never regretted it!

37.1k views37.1k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Horizon
Horizon
Apollo
Apollo

Horizon provides a complete backend that makes it dramatically simpler to build, deploy, manage, and scale engaging JavaScript web and mobile apps. Horizon is extensible, integrates with the Node.js stack, and allows building modern, arbitrarily complex applications.

Build a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing REST APIs, so you can ship new application features fast without waiting on backend changes.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
6.8K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
348
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
22
Stacks
2.7K
Followers
56
Followers
1.8K
Votes
0
Votes
25
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 12
    From the creators of Meteor
  • 8
    Great documentation
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Real time if use subscription
Cons
  • 1
    File upload is not supported
  • 1
    Increase in complexity of implementing (subscription)
Integrations
RethinkDB
RethinkDB
GraphQL
GraphQL
JavaScript
JavaScript
GraphQL
GraphQL

What are some alternatives to Horizon, Apollo?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Firebase

Firebase

Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Socket.IO

Socket.IO

It enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication. It works on every platform, browser or device, focusing equally on reliability and speed.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

PubNub

PubNub

PubNub makes it easy for you to add real-time capabilities to your apps, without worrying about the infrastructure. Build apps that allow your users to engage in real-time across mobile, browser, desktop and server.

Pusher

Pusher

Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

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