Hot Chocolate vs Mercurius
Hot Chocolate
chillicream.comMercurius
mercurius.devSide by side
| Figure | Hot Chocolate | Mercurius |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · GraphQL Tools | 8.1 (#6) | 6.5 (#24) |
| License | The product page says Hot Chocolate is MIT licensed and may be used, modified, and distributed in commercial or private projects. | The repository lists the project under the MIT license. |
| Security | Hot Chocolate integrates with ASP.NET Core authentication and supports JWT, cookies, and other authentication schemes. | Mercurius includes CSRF prevention, which the documentation says is disabled by default and must be enabled in configuration. |
Plans
In their own words
Hot Chocolate
Hot Chocolate is an open-source GraphQL server for.NET that runs on ASP.NET Core and builds a GraphQL schema from C# types and resolvers. Developers can define typed schemas through implementation-first or code-first methods. It supports GraphQL over HTTP and WebSocket, plus Server-Sent Events for streaming responses. Documentation describes schema downloads, a Nitro GraphQL IDE endpoint, and a command-line interface for schema export. Data integrations include Entity Framework, MongoDB, and Marten; DataLoaders and batch resolvers help batch and cache related requests. OpenTelemetry instrumentation covers server, execution, and DataLoader activity. Security guidance recommends query cost analysis, pagination and execution-depth limits, and timeouts for public APIs; trusted documents can restrict private APIs to registered operations. Servers can act as Fusion subgraphs. Hot Chocolate implements the GraphQL 2025 specification and GraphQL over HTTP, and supports spec-compliant clients including Strawberry Shake, Relay, and Apollo Client. It is MIT licensed for commercial or private use. Community support is free; paid Startup support starts at $450 per month and includes two critical incidents.