// the find
graphql/graphql-playground
🎮 GraphQL IDE for better development workflows (GraphQL Subscriptions, interactive docs & collaboration)
GraphQL Playground was a graphical IDE for GraphQL development, offering tabbed queries, subscription support, and a multi-column doc browser. It's now archived — the project formally merged into GraphiQL in April 2026. If you're starting something new, you should not adopt this.
The multi-column interactive docs were genuinely better than GraphiQL's panel-based explorer at the time, making it faster to navigate deeply nested schemas. Subscription support was built in from the start, which GraphiQL added later. The middleware packages for Express, Koa, Hapi, and Lambda made it trivially easy to drop a hosted UI into any server. Tab persistence with saved headers was a small thing that saved real time in daily development.
The repo is archived. Full stop — no new fixes, no security patches, no maintenance. There's a documented XSS reflection vulnerability in the HTML rendering middleware that affected all versions before specific patch releases; if you're running anything older you have a real problem. The React component requires Redux as a peer dependency (via `<Provider store={store}>`), which is an annoying leak of internal state management into consumer code. The monorepo has version drift between packages that was never fully resolved, so picking the right compatible set of package versions was always a guessing game.