GraphQL, surprisingly, is neither a graph query language nor a query language. The comparison isn't really valid.

It's better to understand GraphQL as a protocol that competes with REST. It's only a language in the sense that JSON is a language; i.e., it has a syntax that can be parsed.

For example, GraphQL supports queries like this:

  query movie {
    whereYear(max: 1985)
    actors {
      hasName(like: "goldblum")
    }
  }

But this is something the particular schema and implementation would need to implement. If you want to filter by arbitrary attributes, you're out of luck because the spec is just a syntax. I suppose you do something like:

  where(what: "year", max: 1985)

but you still have to invent a standard set of parameters here: min, max, eq, notEq, lessThan, lessThanOrEq, like, etc. Again, totally ad hoc.

GraphQL, not being a language, also doesn't support variable bindings. So you cannot do self-referencing queries like "find all movies with a director who also acted in it", because that would require some kind of variable support.

(This is not a criticism of GraphQL, by the way. It's great at what it's defined for.)