Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

That was my conclusion looking at them both last year. Hasura had an amazing first-time UX, but postgraphile felt like it was built with production concerns in mind (testing, integrating with larger codebases, easy to add custom or wrap generated CRUD resolvers in js/ts). The most off-putting thing to me, at the time, was that Hasura's solution for auth was to spin up a separate auth service. I prefer a flexible monolith for anything with less than 10 devs working on it. Looks like postgraphile has started paying attention to the first-time UX, but still not as friendly as Hasura's: https://github.com/graphile/starter

Both feel kind of limited by forcing you to encode a ton of logic in SQL which must be migrated vs a mongoid model you can just tweak and commit, but I guess I'm old school and what's old is new again.

These aren't the same things. Hasura is not an admin interface, although it provides something like one. It's an application API.

The django admin interface is not usable by a frontend as an application API.

Django requires you to "meta-model" you have to write Python classes that map to your tables, this is usually duplicate work.

Django's ORM must support many databases, so it produces "least common denominator" SQL and is (stock) oblivious to Postgres' many enhanced data features, you are forced to use various community sourced extensions to get access to features that have been in postgres now for many years.

Django's security system is django only. You are forced to go through django for access control across your business. Eventually this abstraction leaks, and someone starts logging into the db from some other framework and now you have two problems.

This is my opinion and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for it, but Django, Rails, Node, all the Java frameworks, all the meta-modeling and NIH syndroming, are all utterly obsolete. Everything they do can be done in 99% SQL by a data scientist with the help of a competent DBA. "Web application programming" is going to go the way of the dodo bird and devs who don't start learning higher level skills like complex SQL, statistical modeling, linear algebra, and to either be a competent DBA or learn how to treat them fairly with be the first batch of programmers "automated out of a job" by tools like Hasura.

Stitch looks cool, first time I'm seeing it (long-time happy mongo user via rails/mongoid). Is there a self-hosted version I could hook up to an existing app?

Hasura's authz is whatever authz you can derive from the data within your database or from the claims embedded in the authn token. If you have a table that contains the claims for each user, then you can reference that in the authz rule for any other table/view/function. READ notes if user.is_note_reader = true.

We're working on making it easy to integrate resource claims and rule engines that are external as well (make an IO call instead of embedding the rule in the SQL query itself). The good news is that it is possible to do at the Hasura layer because Hasura owns the RBAC so we'll get to it soon enough :)

Over the last few months, we've seen users flip from their custom GraphQL servers to using Hasura because of the reduction in code/maintenance that Hasura brings for their use-cases. Especially when you have a large number of tables. Being able to manage authorization rules at a "type" level instead of a "resolver" level also makes things convenient.

We've also started work on making it easy to integrate REST APIs for custom logic (esp writes) which also helps skip a bunch of GraphQL/authz boilerplate: https://blog.hasura.io/introducing-actions/

I've been shopping around all the BAAS offerings and nhost is really intriguing. Thanks for sharing.