In a typical composable stack, commerce, PIM, search, pricing and content systems each describe the world in their own way. One API talks about SKUs, another about articles, a third about catalogue items. When you want to combine that data you often have to write custom code to describe how the relationships and permissions work.
GraphQL is a structured data format which replaces that reconciliation with a Graph. You define a Product, a Price, a Customer, and express the relationships between them as data fields instead of glue code. Every consumer of your data, whether a frontend, a partner integration or an AI agent, negotiates with the GraphQL schema instead of with the teams behind it.
GraphQL has been proven at scale as the technical foundation for user experiences across a broad range of touchpoints. Originally developed for Facebook, it is an open standard trusted by organisations around the world.
Working with GraphQL, each team owns the data, permissions, and processes as a Subgraph and the platform provides the Federation: composing them into a single view of your organisation's data and the actions that can be taken called a Supergraph.
The Supergraph allows teams to own and manage data independently, and consumers see a single, coherent API.
GraphQL
The structured, typed language that represents your data and APIs to consumers such as AI agents.
Subgraph
One team's slice of the graph, owned and deployed by that team.
Supergraph
The composed whole, one schema every consumer talks to.
