Hasura

Hasura is an open-source data API platform — point it at Postgres, MongoDB, ClickHouse or SQL Server and it generates a production-grade GraphQL (or REST) API with row-level authorization in minutes. We rate it 78/100 — still the fastest path from database to API for most teams, but the v3/DDN pricing pivot and the new PromptQL focus mean it’s no longer the obvious zero-friction choice it once was.

What is Hasura?

Hasura is a data API platform founded in 2017 by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh, headquartered in San Francisco with engineering in Bangalore. The company has raised over $136M across Seed through Series C (Series C in 2022, led by Greenoaks Capital), and customers include Atlassian, NASA, Airbus, Hitachi, Philips, General Mills and Fanatics. The flagship open-source GraphQL Engine launched on GitHub on July 26, 2018 and now sits at 32,000+ stars, making it one of the most starred backend projects in the language ecosystem.

What Hasura actually does is unusual: instead of writing a backend, you give it a connection string and a metadata file, and it compiles your authorization rules and joins down into a single optimized SQL query per GraphQL request. The v3 engine — branded Hasura DDN (Data Delivery Network) — was rewritten from Haskell to Rust and shipped GA in 2024, adding federation across multiple databases (a single supergraph spanning Postgres + MongoDB + ClickHouse), and in late 2024 the team launched PromptQL, a layer that lets LLMs query your data through Hasura’s authorization model without hallucinating rows it shouldn’t see.

Key Features of Hasura

• Instant CRUD + relationships from your schema: Connect a database and Hasura introspects every table, view and foreign key, then exposes paginated queries, filters, aggregations, mutations and subscriptions. A 50-table schema goes from zero to working API in the time it takes to type the connection string.
• Row-level authorization in metadata, not code: Permissions are declarative JSON tied to a session variable like x-hasura-user-id. Hasura compiles them into a SQL WHERE clause on every query, so a multi-tenant app gets airtight isolation without an N+1 middleware layer.
• Real-time subscriptions over Postgres: Any GraphQL query becomes a live query simply by switching the operation to subscription. Hasura piggybacks on Postgres’s logical replication to push updates to thousands of concurrent clients without a separate websocket service.
• Federated supergraph (DDN): v3 lets you stitch one Postgres OLTP database, one MongoDB document store, one ClickHouse analytics warehouse and one custom TypeScript/Python/Go connector into a single GraphQL endpoint with cross-source joins — the closest the open-source world gets to a managed Apollo Federation.
• PromptQL for AI agents: Instead of letting an LLM write raw SQL against your DB, PromptQL exposes Hasura’s authorization-checked schema as a tool, then plans queries against it. Hasura’s own benchmarks claim 100% accuracy on common analytical questions versus 30–50% for direct text-to-SQL.
• Event triggers + actions: Postgres insert/update/delete events fire HTTP webhooks with at-least-once delivery, and custom REST endpoints can be merged into the GraphQL schema as “actions,” giving you a clean place for non-CRUD business logic without leaving the API surface.

What Users Say About Hasura

On Hacker News, the recurring sentiment is split along version lines. The v2 engine (still Apache 2.0, still self-hostable) is widely praised — comments like “Hasura is the fastest way I’ve ever gone from idea to working API” appear under almost every “backend in 2026” thread. On G2 and TrustRadius the headline pros are “ridiculous productivity” and “permission system that actually works,” with reviewers consistently rating it 4.5/5+.

The criticism is consistent and worth taking seriously. The 2023 pricing change — from a $99/month Standard plan to enterprise tiers starting much higher — generated a real backlash; Hasura ultimately grandfathered every pre-2023 user onto the legacy plan, but trust took a hit. Indie Hackers and Reddit’s r/graphql still flag two recurring pains: the Cloud experience requires bringing your own Postgres (so you’re managing two providers and a firewall), and the “dashboard-driven” metadata workflow makes multi-environment Git workflows clunky compared to a code-first ORM. PromptQL is too new to have stable production reviews — the early Show HN thread is enthusiastic but cautious about cost.

Hasura Pricing

Hasura sells two products in 2026: the Apache 2.0 self-hosted v2 engine (free forever) and Hasura DDN, the managed v3 platform billed per active model.

Plan	Price	Best For
DDN Free	$0 forever	1 developer, unlimited models, 30-day observability — solo projects and prototypes
DDN Base	From $5/active model/month	Single team, business-critical workloads, unlimited developers
DDN Advanced	From $30/active model/month	Multi-team federated supergraphs, multi-repo CI/CD, HIPAA*
Self-hosted v2	Free (Apache 2.0)	Anyone who wants to run their own GraphQL engine on their own infra

Connector hosting on DDN is metered separately at $0.075/vCPU-hour and $0.0075/GiB-hour, which is fair but worth modeling before you commit — a busy connector can quietly outrun the per-model fee.

Who Should Use Hasura?

Best for: Backend and full-stack engineers building data-heavy CRUD applications on Postgres or MongoDB who want a production-grade API in days instead of months — internal tools, B2B SaaS, real-time dashboards, and multi-tenant apps where row-level authorization is the hard part. PromptQL also makes Hasura compelling for teams shipping LLM agents that need to read internal data accurately.

Not ideal for: Teams whose API surface is mostly write-heavy custom business logic (you’ll end up writing most of it as Actions and the value proposition shrinks), tiny side projects that don’t need RBAC (Supabase or PocketBase will be simpler), or shops on a strict GraphQL-Apollo-Federation roadmap who don’t want to learn DDN’s metadata model.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Genuinely 10× faster API delivery for CRUD-heavy products — multiple G2 reviewers cite shipping a backend in a weekend.
• Authorization model is one of the best in the industry — declarative, testable, and compiled into a single SQL query.
• Apache 2.0 v2 engine means you can self-host indefinitely with no vendor lock-in.
• v3’s Rust rewrite delivers measurable latency improvements vs. the old Haskell engine on the same workload.
• PromptQL is a credible answer to the “LLMs hallucinate against my database” problem.

Cons:

• Pricing reset in 2023 burned trust — community is still cautious about further changes.
• Hasura Cloud requires you to bring your own Postgres provider (Neon, Aiven, RDS) — friction vs. all-in-one platforms.
• DDN’s metadata-driven workflow doesn’t map cleanly to standard ORM/migrations git flows out of the box.
• Custom write logic still needs to live somewhere (Actions, event triggers, or a separate service).
• v3 is the future, but most third-party tutorials and Stack Overflow answers still target v2.

Alternatives to Hasura

The closest peer is PostGraphile — also instant GraphQL on Postgres, MIT-licensed, but smaller community and Postgres-only. Supabase ships an auto-generated PostgREST API plus auth, storage and realtime, and is a better choice if you want one platform for everything. Appwrite is the open-source BaaS analogue. For pure GraphQL federation across services, Apollo Federation is the incumbent, but you write the subgraphs yourself.

Verdict: Is Hasura Worth It?

Yes — if you have a relational database with non-trivial relationships and authorization, Hasura is still the fastest, cleanest way to expose it as a real API. The 78/100 reflects that the open-source v2 engine is excellent and DDN’s technical bones are strong, but the 2023 pricing memory lingers and DDN’s active-model billing requires careful modeling before you commit. Try the free tier or self-host v2 first; only graduate to DDN once you’ve confirmed the federation features actually pay for themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hasura free?

Yes. The self-hosted Hasura GraphQL Engine v2 is Apache 2.0 and free forever, and Hasura DDN has a permanent Free tier with unlimited models for solo developers. Paid DDN plans start at $5 per active model per month.

Is Hasura open source?

Partially. The v2 GraphQL Engine is fully Apache 2.0 on GitHub. The v3 Rust engine that powers DDN is also published in the same repo, and all Data Connectors in the Connector Hub are Apache 2.0. The Hasura Cloud / DDN control plane and PromptQL are proprietary.

What databases does Hasura support?

v2 supports PostgreSQL (and forks like Neon, Aurora, Yugabyte, Citus), Microsoft SQL Server and BigQuery. v3/DDN adds MongoDB, ClickHouse, Snowflake and any custom source via the TypeScript, Python or Go Connector SDKs.

How does Hasura compare to Supabase?

Supabase is an all-in-one BaaS — auto-generated REST API plus auth, storage, edge functions and a hosted Postgres. Hasura is a focused data-API layer: deeper GraphQL features, better federation across multiple databases, and a more powerful permission DSL, but you bring your own Postgres and your own auth provider. Pick Supabase for an MVP, Hasura when GraphQL or multi-source federation is the differentiator.

What is PromptQL?

PromptQL is Hasura’s AI-agent query layer launched in late 2024. Instead of letting an LLM write raw SQL, it lets the model plan queries against Hasura’s authorization-checked schema and execute them via the engine, which Hasura claims dramatically reduces hallucinations versus direct text-to-SQL.