Hacker Trends
how it worksopen the tool →

Hacker Trends › rest api vs grpc vs graphql

rest api vs grpc vs graphql on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, rest api leads rest api vs grpc vs graphql with 29,218 mentions to graphql’s 23,878, peaking in Jun 2025.

Mention-over-time for rest api vs grpc vs graphql, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

rest api29,218 mentions, peak Jun 2025grpc7,093 mentions, peak Jul 2022graphql23,878 mentions, peak Nov 2020
2008201120142017202020232026
Open this comparison in the interactive tool — zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

How the lead changed hands

API design, era by era: REST becomes the web's default 2012–15, then the post-REST generation splits: gRPC for service-to-service from 2016, GraphQL for the client from 2017.

The stories behind each line

Top “rest api” stories
  1. Show HN: Mitmproxy2swagger – Automagically reverse-engineer REST APIs 691 points · 2022
  2. MitmProxy2Swagger: Automagically reverse-engineer REST APIs 590 points · 2025
  3. Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it? 557 points · 2022
  4. Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client 523 points · 2016
Top “grpc” stories
  1. Postman Now Supports gRPC 409 points · 2022
  2. Announcing gRPC Support in Nginx 384 points · 2018
  3. gRPC-Web is going GA 345 points · 2018
  4. gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs 329 points · 2017
Top “graphql” stories
  1. After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL 1,259 points · 2024
  2. Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman 758 points · 2022
  3. GraphQL kinda sucks 720 points · 2022
  4. Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe, GraphQL, React, and Apollo 526 points · 2019

Each term on its own

More comparisons

Build your own comparison on the main chart, or read how Hacker Trends works.