CosmoBoth handle GraphQL Federation. Only Cosmo scales it without breaking your organization.
Federation grows. Teams multiply. Schema reviews become bottlenecks. Cosmo automates the governance Apollo leaves to you — so the platform scales as fast as the org behind it.
Finally, you can scale federation without the coordination overhead.
Three things break in Apollo as your federation grows past a handful of subgraphs. Cosmo fixes each one at the platform layer.
Governance built in, not bolted on
Automated schema checks, breaking-change detection, and required-reviewer workflows replace the manual review cycles that slow teams down as federation grows past 20 subgraphs.
Weeks to production, not months
Simpler architecture, faster onboarding, lower implementation risk. Teams that delayed federation because of Apollo's complexity ship with Cosmo in weeks — many in under five working days.
Open source. Your infra. Your control.
100% open source under Apache 2.0. Self-host anywhere. Inspect every line. No forced cloud dependency, no usage-based surprises, no negotiating Enterprise tier just to run the router on your own metal.
Cosmo vs Apollo GraphOS
A practical comparison for teams evaluating their federation platform. No marketing fluff — what each product actually does, side by side.
CosmoWhat changes when you choose Cosmo
The difference is not just features. It is how your team operates day to day — what happens during a schema change, a deploy, an incident.
With CosmoRecommended
A platform that takes coordination off your engineers' plates.
- ✓Schema changes validated automatically against production traffic
- ✓Teams coordinate on a visual canvas — not in Slack threads
- ✓Federation live in weeks, not months of configuration
- ✓Full observability from day one, not an add-on
- ✓Transparent pricing you can forecast annually
- ✓Self-host if compliance or data residency requires it
AWith Apollo GraphOSStatus quo
A platform that pushes coordination work back to your engineers.
- —Schema reviews are orchestrated through a proprietary cloud control plane.
- —Team coordination via Slack, docs, and alignment calls
- —Longer ramp-up period, more setup complexity
- —Observability requires configuration and tool integration
- —Usage-based pricing that scales unpredictably
- —Cloud-only unless you negotiate Enterprise terms
Common questions about switching
Switching platforms is a real decision. Here's what teams ask before they commit — answered honestly.
MigrationWe have dozens of subgraphs on Apollo Federation v2. How hard is the migration?
Cosmo is fully compatible with Apollo Federation v2 schemas. Your existing subgraphs work without changes. The router swap is a configuration change, not a rewrite. Most teams complete the migration in under a week.
AdoptionMy team already knows Apollo. Will they need to relearn everything?
If your team knows Federation v2, they already know how to write subgraphs for Cosmo. The schema language is the same. The difference is in the platform layer: governance, collaboration, and observability. Those are new capabilities, not replacements.
ComplianceWe are in a regulated industry. Can Cosmo meet our compliance requirements?
Cosmo is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 certified. You can self-host for full data residency control. Open source means your security team can audit the code directly rather than relying on vendor attestations.
EcosystemApollo has a much larger community. What if WunderGraph doesn't keep up?
Apollo has a larger community today. That's a fair point. Cosmo runs in production at eBay, SoundCloud, and Shutterstock. The open source model means the project survives independent of the company. Your investment is protected by the Apache 2.0 license.
PerformanceIs the router actually faster, or is that just marketing?
The Cosmo Router is written in Go, optimized for federated query planning, and benchmarks at 186ms P99 latency vs 1.51s for Apollo Router under the same load. Throughput: 1,167 RPS vs 143 RPS. Run our benchmark suite against your own subgraphs — the numbers reproduce.
From Apollo to Cosmo. In their words.
Real teams, real before-and-after. The patterns repeat: governance overhead disappears, ramp-up shortens, the router gets faster.
We have experienced significant performance enhancements for our most complex queries since switching from Apollo to Cosmo. The query planning in Cosmo is more advanced and intelligently optimized.
We started building our own Federation Solution. We ended up implementing a home baked solution utilizing Apollo Rover and schema stitching. It worked for a while, but as we grew, it became more and more difficult to maintain, and harder for teams to adopt. We decided to look for a better solution.
Federation that scales without breaking your organization.
30-minute demo, tailored to your setup. We'll walk through governance, collaboration, and observability — and your specific migration path.
