Break Free from Apollo: How Inigo Beats GraphOS on Value and Features
In our interactions with numerous enterprise GraphQL users—through sales calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings at industry events like GraphQLConf, GraphQL Summit, and API World—a consistent message has emerged: While many are drawn to Apollo GraphOS, its high costs and limited functionality behind feature gates leave much to be desired. As we've explored in “Control Your GraphQL Destiny with Inigo (Don’t Get Vendor Locked),” a sense of vendor lock-in is a key factor driving stickiness with Apollo.
At Inigo, we challenge this status quo by delivering unparalleled value across the board—to your API platform mean, development teams, security personnel, business units, and operational staff—while maintaining a competitive and scalable pricing structure. Our approach has resonated with the market, allowing us to attract prospective and former Apollo customers with our comprehensive feature set, often at up to 70% savings.
Here are 9 compelling reasons why Inigo stands out as the superior choice in terms of value and pricing when compared to Apollo GraphOS and other competitors:
1. Inigo is Battle-Tested and Enterprise-Ready
In the Enterprise GraphQL space, Inigo is one of the few vendors with a significant footprint in large-scale GraphQL deployments. While other alternatives to Apollo may entice with their open-source nature and alternative GraphQL gateway implementations, they still need to catch up in maturity and features.
Inigo has successfully processed 40 billion GraphQL queries per month for customers integrating Inigo into their production environments. We have customers with supergraphs composed of up to 190 subgraphs, all while incorporating advanced features like field-level observability against these enormous schemas. Furthermore, Inigo’s customers leverage our comprehensive toolset for schema composition, registry, and breaking change detection. Our robustness has led numerous organizations to transition from Apollo or steer away completely, favoring Inigo as a superior alternative.
2. Inigo is the Fastest Migration Path from Apollo GraphOS
Apollo Gateway and Apollo Router are well-established open-source projects that provide feature-rich GraphQL gateways supporting Apollo Federation with GraphOS. Many users have extended the functionality of Gateway/Router with custom middleware and plugins tailored to their requirements. Consequently, transitioning to a different GraphQL gateway implementation would be daunting and labor-intensive.
Inigo seamlessly integrates with your current Apollo Gateway or Router setups, allowing you to maintain these open-source deployments without a contractual agreement with Apollo. This compatibility ensures a swift and effortless migration process, minimizing disruption and resource expenditure.
3. Inigo Won’t “Seat-Gate” your Team: Developers Should Have Access Too
As highlighted in our article "Streamline 8 Everyday Tasks of a GraphQL Developer with Inigo", there are numerous advantages to providing all team members, including developers, access to an enterprise GraphQL platform. With Apollo GraphOS, extending access to developers is cost-prohibitive, leaving developers without crucial insights into observability and other key features. In contrast, Inigo ensures that developers can access real-time observability data, enabling them to proactively address issues without resorting to external tools like Datadog. Moreover, Inigo fosters collaboration within GraphQL teams by offering powerful tools for implementing linting standards and effortlessly sharing GraphQL queries vital for development and testing.
4. Inigo Doesn’t Gate Features
Apollo has a reputation for gating features, compelling customers to commit to costly enterprise contracts to access functionalities that should be more affordable, like self-hosting capabilities for Apollo Gateway/Router and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for managing GraphQL API security. In contrast, Inigo offers unrestricted access to all platform features from the outset. For a detailed comparison of how Inigo's features measure up against Apollo GraphOS, we invite you to explore our blog post, "Top 10 Benefits of Inigo's Replacement for GraphOS".
5. Inigo Improves the Reliability and Performance of Your GraphQL API
With unmatched observability, deep analytics, insights, and error impact levels, Inigo enables superior proactive and reactive responses to reliability and performance issues that arise from your underlying GraphQL services. Even better, alerting is built into Inigo, as described in “Advanced Alerts for Your GraphQL API with Inigo”. We often have customers identify issues with their GraphQL API that were invisible to their existing API monitoring tools due to the nature of GraphQL, as discussed in our blog "Still Using Datadog For GraphQL Analytics?"
6. Inigo Improves GraphQL Security Posture
Query protection (i.e. preventing injection attacks), rate-limiting, RBAC, and controlling access to schema introspection are critical security requirements for your GraphQL API. Bad actors versed in GraphQL vulnerabilities can easily bring down your GraphQL server or gateway, as described in “How to Prevent a Denial of Service Attack”. Inigo goes above and beyond what Apollo can offer with GraphOS in all of these areas, with all of these capabilities easily handled with YAML configurations that can be checked into a Git repository and automatically deployed, therefore implementing a DevSecOps approach to your GraphQL API security.
7. Inigo Instills GraphOps Best Practices
Enterprise GraphQL operations (GraphOps) best practices include implementing schema composition, breaking change checks, and schema linting rules into your CI/CD flows. Inigo supports these features via our Inigo CLI, which can be easily integrated into your pipeline. Therefore, non-compliant or breaking schema changes will fail builds and prevent merges from happening until the issues are remediated or overridden. All these features are supported out of the box with Inigo at no additional cost.
8. Inigo Fits Anywhere Into Your GraphQL Footprint
We’ve spoken to many enterprise customers who are modernizing their GraphQL services and starting their journey with federation. Still, they feel overwhelmed by the complexity of heterogeneous and legacy GraphQL deployments. Inigo offers several GraphQL server integrations, and we offer sidecar and standalone deployments for maximum flexibility to support your existing GraphQL servers. In tandem, you can implement your next-generation GraphQL architecture and leverage Inigo's other great enterprise features to accelerate the journey.
9. Inigo will Cut Costs by up to 70%
Inigo has hyper-efficient data collection, processing, and storage of GraphQL metrics data, which allows us to capture 100% of your query metrics while maintaining affordable costs. Remarkably, Inigo maintains pricing that is up to 70% lower than Apollo GraphOS, which collects only samples of metrics. Furthermore, Inigo offers a more transparent pricing model with no per-seat charges or feature gates, unlike Apollo's approach with GraphOS.
Conclusion: Elevating Enterprise GraphQL while Lowering Costs
Inigo's value proposition for enterprise GraphQL customers is clear and compelling. Inigo ensures a smooth and efficient migration path by offering a battle-tested, enterprise-ready platform that seamlessly integrates with existing Apollo deployments. Our commitment to providing full feature access, enhancing the reliability and performance of your GraphQL API, and instilling best practices in GraphQL API operations sets us apart from the competition.
Moreover, Inigo's flexible and cost-effective approach and dedication to observability and security make us the ideal choice for growing and optimizing your GraphQL services. As we continue to innovate and expand our offerings, we remain focused on delivering the highest value and satisfaction to our customers.
Discover Inigo's transformative impact on your GraphQL journey and join the growing number of enterprises that have made the switch. Embrace the future with Inigo, where observability, security, and performance converge with a cost-effective enterprise GraphQL platform.
Ready to take the next steps with Inigo? You can:
- Get started for free at app.inigo.io
- Book a demo today at inigo.io/demo
- Ask questions on our Slack channel
