Grafbase delivers a modern, developer-first approach to GraphQL APIs: native Federation, schema registry for schema checks and composition, analytics, and composable extensions. For many teams, the managed Grafbase Cloud platform is the fastest way to get started.
But for companies with strict data residency needs, internal compliance rules, or existing infrastructure investments, self-hosting the Grafbase Enterprise Platform provides a powerful alternative.
The Grafbase Enterprise Platform is a self-hosted version of the schema registry, analytics and dashboard capabilities of Grafbase. It offers the same experience as the Grafbase Cloud on grafbase.com.
You get the full platform, including the schema registry, deployed in your own environment. All the benefits of Grafbase, with full control over where and how it runs:
- Schema Registry to manage and visualize changes to your federated graph
- Schema Checks, including custom checks and operation checks to detect breaking changes
- Schema Proposals to collaboratively design schema changes before implementing them and enforce review
- Trusted Documents (also known as persisted queries)
- GraphQL analytics, including field-level analytics
The Grafbase Gateway, on the other hand, is open source and always self-hosted.
Some current users of the Enterprise Platform, like a Fortune 500 financial enterprise, need to guarantee that no data leaves their network or region, whether for GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP, or other regulatory reasons.
Self-hosting the Grafbase Enterprise Platform allows you to:
- Deploy in private VPCs or on-prem environments
- Ensure complete control over data flows and storage
- Comply with strict internal or external policies
The Grafbase Enterprise Platform is designed for zero external data exposure while still delivering a scalabe and user friendly GraphQL federation management platform.
With the self-hosted platform, you manage how the Grafbase platform integrates in your infrastructure. It is distributed as a Helm chart and containers. From there, you can define how it fits with your internal networks and services, integrate with your databases and your identity provider.
Deploy Grafbase into your stack and integrate with your existing auth providers. It aligns with your existing RBAC and SSO policies.
Easily connect Grafbase with your enterprise identity provider so teams can authenticate and authorize access through your existing systems. No context switching. No redundant auth logic.
Self-hosting lets you:
- Deploy Grafbase with your own tooling (Terraform, GitOps, Kubernetes)
- Control how updates roll out across environments
Control when and how the platform itself gets updated. Ideal for teams that need to coordinate infrastructure changes across environments without surprises.
By hosting Grafbase yourself:
- You retain control over SLAs, scaling policies, and uptime guarantees
- You avoid runtime or feature surprises tied to external SaaS deployments
- You align with internal compliance and procurement frameworks
This is especially valuable for enterprises with long software lifecycles or strict vendor evaluation processes.
Consider self-hosting if:
- You're operating in a regulated or high-security environment
- Your org mandates on-prem or VPC-only deployments
- You want to standardize on GraphQL across teams and services, but under your own control
For startups or teams with limited DevOps resources, the Grafbase cloud remains ideal:
- No infrastructure to manage
- Instant deployments and previews
- The gateway is open source and is always self-hosted, so you remain in control of all the software on the request path
The good news? Both models share the same CLI, schema config, and developer experience, which means moving between them is smooth, too.
Self-hosting the Grafbase Enterprise platform gives you the best of modern GraphQL - federation, extensibility - with the control your infrastructure and compliance teams demand.
For enterprises building next-generation APIs in regulated or private environments, it's a powerful foundation that combines developer flexibility with operational peace of mind.