Grafbase is a GraphQL federation platform centered on a Rust-based gateway that composes multiple subgraphs — GraphQL, REST via OpenAPI, gRPC, or MCP — into a single federated API. It implements Apollo Federation v2 composition, so existing subgraphs built against the Apollo spec work without changes, but the runtime is a Rust rewrite rather than a fork of Apollo Router.
The core open-source component is the Grafbase Gateway (known previously as grafbase-gateway), deployable as a single Rust binary, a Docker container, or on the edge via Grafbase Cloud’s Cloudflare-backed runtime. It supports hot schema reloading, entity caching, rate limiting, JWT/JWKS auth, operation allow-lists (trusted documents), OpenTelemetry tracing/metrics, and WASI-based custom hooks for request/response mutation. The commercial platform adds a schema registry, composition checks in CI, analytics, and managed deployment.
Grafbase competes directly with Apollo GraphOS / Router, Hive Gateway (which also drives this very site), Cosmo (WunderGraph), and Mesh. The “GraphQL gateway written in Rust, Federation v2-compatible, runnable on the edge” angle is the shared pitch across that cohort; differentiation is mostly about extensibility model (WASM vs. TypeScript plugins vs. Rhai scripts), the registry/tooling, and which non-GraphQL protocols the gateway can pull into a subgraph without writing glue code.