Respectfully disagree--I like Relay better. And Relay 2 is including client-side state, so you don't need Redux.
It has a steep learning curve and some initial setup overhead; but from a long-range perspective--I think it will have better performance and code comprehensibility. Maybe Apollo is better suited for freelancers though.
I thought Relay already had client side state? Also what's Relay 2? Where are you finding information about it?
My opinion of Relay right now is that it has way too many needless complications. It looks like it brought a ton of baggage from being used in Facebook that just gets in the way of general use. So I'm interested in an alternative.
However, the real problem with all of this stuff is cache management. Properly managing the cache in the face of mutations is very complicated and it's impossible to be perfect anyway without some sort of pubsub.
By client-side state, I mean user interactions that affect variables used across the app that don't need to be persisted. Relay doesn't do that yet, as it only deals with persisted data. @josephsavona[1] and @wincent[2] are the guys putting information out about Relay 2. Greg Hurrell (@wincent) did a talk[3] about it in August.
And since I'm linking to related resources, I just want to add a plug for an awesome project a friend is working on (and we're putting it into production on my startup project). @calebmer/postgraphql[4] let's you get a free GraphQL API from a PostgreSQL schema.
@calebmer/postgraphql is an awesome project and really worth looking into! I actually built a system on top of it which automatically generated GraphQL change subscriptions through Postgres triggers.
It has a steep learning curve and some initial setup overhead; but from a long-range perspective--I think it will have better performance and code comprehensibility. Maybe Apollo is better suited for freelancers though.