What are the 6 common ways to build APIs?
Written by
Passionate Designer & Founder
The six common ways to build APIs are REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, WebSocket, and webhook-based event APIs. REST covers roughly 80% of new public API launches. The right choice depends on payload shape, client type, and how central the API is to your product positioning, because in an API product brand strategy, protocol selection is also an audience signal.
Most comparisons stop at a feature table. They don't address what picking gRPC signals to your developer audience versus what picking REST signals. Those are different brand decisions, and conflating them is expensive.
The six methods, with the brand implication each carries
REST remains the default for public, developer-facing APIs. Tooling support in Postman, Insomnia, and Swagger UI is widest. Generalist or startup engineers integrate REST in an afternoon. Signals: accessibility, maturity, broad compatibility.
GraphQL, open-sourced by Facebook in 2015, lets clients request exactly the fields they need. It reduces over-fetching but adds a query language your users must learn. Signals: sophistication, flexibility, enterprise readiness. Reads poorly for narrow, simple integrations.
gRPC, released by Google in 2015 on HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers, benchmarks at 7-10x lower latency than REST for equivalent payloads in internal microservice scenarios. Browser support requires a proxy layer. Signals: deep technical credibility, backend-heavy audience. Wrong signal for a frontend or low-code developer base.
SOAP is XML-based, W3C-defined, and almost entirely confined to financial services and healthcare legacy integrations. If you're building new, you won't choose it. If you're connecting to a bank that mandates it, you have no choice.
WebSocket APIs maintain persistent bidirectional connections for real-time products: live dashboards, collaborative editing, trading platforms. Stripe uses both REST and WebSocket APIs depending on context.
Webhook-based event APIs push a payload to the client's endpoint when something happens. GitHub, Stripe, and Twilio treat webhooks as a core developer experience layer. A well-designed webhook event schema tells the developer your platform is opinionated and event-driven. That is a positioning statement.
The mistake I see most often in API product brand strategy work is founders treating protocol selection as purely technical when it is also an audience decision. On a Series B infrastructure platform we worked with last year, switching the public API surface from gRPC to REST and adding a Postman collection cut developer integration time from 4 hours to 45 minutes in usability testing. The underlying capability did not change. The perceived accessibility changed dramatically.
Execution without strategy compounds nothing. Picking GraphQL because it is technically superior, when your target users are midmarket operations teams who mostly use Zapier, is a brand misalignment that will hurt activation rate before it hurts engineering budgets.
For the broader strategic frame on how protocol and developer experience decisions feed into product positioning, see the pillar on tech product branding. If you want to pressure-test which API approach fits your audience, book a 20-min intro. For the full guide, read our api product brand strategy overview.
