If you are building a new application in 2025, the default advice used to be simple: “Just use GraphQL. It is modern, flexible, and solves overfetching.”
But walk into any engineering management meeting this year, and you will hear a different story. You will hear about the “GraphQL tax.” You will listen to about security teams failing pentests because of complex nested queries. You will hear about the absolute chaos of the forced Shopify GraphQL migration that left thousands of developers scrambling.
We are seeing a massive correction in how we build APIs. The “one size fits all” era is over. The “API Battle Royale” isn’t about finding a winner — it’s about stopping the bleeding from choosing the wrong tool.
Here is the honest, no-hype breakdown of the API landscape in 2025: why teams are rushing back to REST, why gRPC is quietly running the world, and where GraphQL actually belongs.
REST: The “Boring” Technology That Is Winning Again
For a few years, it was fashionable to hate on REST. It was “old.” It required multiple round-trips. It overfetched data.
But in 2025, startup after startup is quietly ripping out their complex GraphQL layers and going back to plain old REST. Why?
Because caching is hard.
With REST, you get HTTP caching for free. Your browser knows how to do it. CDNs like Cloudflare know how to do it. A GET request to /api/products/123 can be cached at the edge, serving millions of users with zero load on your database.
With GraphQL, everything is a POST request. The CDN has no idea if the query is for a product or a user. You have to implement complex application-level caching (like persisted queries) just to get back the performance you had for free with REST.
The “Shopify Warning”
Look at the chaos surrounding Shopify’s forced migration to GraphQL in early 2025. Developers weren’t celebrating the “modern” upgrade; they were mourning the loss of simplicity. Simple tasks like “count all products” became complex pagination nightmares.
When to use REST in 2025:
- Public APIs: If you are building an API for other developers (like Stripe or Twilio), REST is still king. It is predictable, toolable, and easy to debug with
curl. - Simple Resources: If your app is mostly “Forms over Data” (CRUD), you do not need a graph. You need simple endpoints.
- Team Velocity: Junior developers understand resources and HTTP verbs instantly. They struggle with N+1 query problems in GraphQL resolvers.
GraphQL: The Ferrari You Can’t Afford to Maintain
GraphQL is an incredible technology. It solves the “waterfall” problem (fetching user -> then fetching their posts -> then fetching comments) better than anything else.
But it comes with a tax that nobody talks about until it is too late.
The Security Nightmare
In 2025, security is the #1 reason teams are abandoning GraphQL. When you give clients a query language, you give attackers a query language. Attackers can construct deeply nested queries that exhaust your server resources (DoS attacks) or probe for data relationships you didn’t intend to expose. Securing a REST endpoint is easy; securing a graph requires complex complexity analysis and rate limiting on a per-node basis.
The “Backend for Frontend” (BFF) Pattern
GraphQL has found its true home, and it is not as a general-purpose API for your entire company. It is best used as a Backend for Frontend (BFF).
This is the pattern successful teams use:
- Frontend: React/Mobile app talks to a GraphQL server.
- GraphQL Server: Acts as a thin aggregation layer. It doesn’t touch the database.
- Backend Services: The GraphQL server calls internal REST or gRPC microservices to get the actual data.
This gives frontend developers the flexibility they love (getting all data in one request) without forcing backend teams to expose their database schema directly to the internet.
When to use GraphQL in 2025:
- Mobile Apps: Bandwidth is precious. Fetching exactly what you need is critical.
- Aggregating Microservices: You need to pull data from the User Service, Billing Service, and Product Service to render a single dashboard.
- Frontend-Led Teams: If your frontend team needs to iterate faster than your backend team can build endpoints.
gRPC: The Speed Demon Running the World
While frontend teams argue about REST vs. GraphQL, backend teams have quietly moved on to gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call).
If REST is a text message, gRPC is a mind-meld.
It uses Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) instead of JSON. This means payloads are tiny binary packets, not bloated text. It uses HTTP/2 by default, allowing multiple requests to fly over a single connection simultaneously.
Performance Check:
- REST: ~250ms latency (average)
- GraphQL: ~180ms latency (highly variable)
- gRPC: ~25ms latency
The 2025 Game Changer: ConnectRPC
For years, the problem with gRPC was that browsers couldn’t speak it natively. You needed a special proxy (Envoy) to translate.
Enter ConnectRPC. This has exploded in popularity in 2025. It allows you to write gRPC services that automatically work in the browser using standard fetch. No proxies, no headaches. It gives you the type safety and speed of gRPC with the ease of use of a standard JSON API.
When to use gRPC/ConnectRPC in 2025:
- Microservices: Service-to-service communication should almost always be gRPC. It is strictly typed (no more guessing if a field is a string or a number) and blazingly fast.
- Real-Time Data: If you are building a stock ticker, a game, or a chat app, gRPC’s streaming capabilities blow REST out of the water.
- Strict Contracts: If breaking an API contract (changing a field name) causes a system outage, use gRPC. Its schema enforcement prevents “oops” moments.
The Verdict: Stop Looking for a Silver Bullet
The “API Battle Royale” has no single winner because the contenders are playing different games. Instead of looking for a silver bullet, use this cheat sheet to choose the right tool for the job.
For Public Developer APIs… choose REST.
Its universal compatibility, easy learning curve, and powerful caching support make it the undisputed champion for public-facing services. Your consumers will thank you for the predictability.
For Internal Microservices… choose gRPC.
For service-to-service communication, nothing beats gRPC. It delivers ten times the performance of REST, guarantees type-safety with Protobuf, and excels at real-time data streaming.
For Mobile App Backends… choose GraphQL (as a BFF).
To save bandwidth and solve complex data fetching from multiple sources, GraphQL is your best friend. Use it as a “Backend for Frontend” to give your mobile clients the flexibility they need without exposing your entire system.
For Simple Web Apps… choose REST.
Do not overengineer. For straightforward applications that handle basic data creation and retrieval, REST provides all the functionality you need without the added complexity of other solutions.
For Complex Web Apps… choose ConnectRPC.
When you need end-to-end type safety and high performance in the browser, ConnectRPC is the modern choice. It gives you all the benefits of gRPC without the headaches of browser incompatibility.
The most mature engineering decision you can make in 2025 isn’t choosing the “newest” tech — it’s choosing the one that solves your specific bottleneck.
For many of us, that means falling in love with “boring” technology all over again.