Hasura

Hasura is an open-source GraphQL engine that automatically generates a production-ready GraphQL API by introspecting databases and data sources. Connect it to PostgreSQL and it instantly exposes every table, view, and relationship as a fully-typed, queryable schema — including mutations, pagination, filtering, aggregations, and real-time subscriptions — without writing a single resolver.

Beyond schema generation, Hasura handles access control at the row and column level via role-based rules, captures database events to trigger webhooks (enabling event-driven microservice patterns), and allows extending the API with custom REST endpoints (Actions) or remote GraphQL services (Remote Schemas). This makes it practical to build complex production APIs while keeping business logic in dedicated services rather than tangled inside the API layer itself.

The platform has evolved through two major architectures: Hasura v2 (the classic GraphQL Engine, self-hostable via Docker or deployable on Hasura Cloud), and Hasura DDN (Data Delivery Network, v3 — a cloud-native federated supergraph platform for multi-team, multi-database architectures). The open-source core is Apache 2.0 licensed; advanced enterprise features and the DDN cloud require paid plans.

Hasura is a step up from PostGraphile in terms of managed experience: it offers a console UI, multi-database support beyond PostgreSQL (Snowflake, MongoDB, ClickHouse, MySQL via connectors), and a hosted cloud option — at the cost of more vendor dependency. With 32,000 GitHub stars and deployments powering millions of users, it is the most widely adopted managed GraphQL engine available.