When to use Express/Apollo over just Apollor-Server, what are the use cases?

[ivanjeremic]

Is Apollo + WebFramework only used if we need to build also a UI?

[abernix]

The apollo-server package is a great getting started package, but if you need to do more advanced customization (or most notably, if you need access to the Express application itself, you'll want to move toward apollo-server-express (or any of the other integrations: e.g., Koa, Fastify, Lambda, etc.).

It's common to start with apollo-server and then switch to apollo-server-express when and if the need arises. It's generally just a few (additional) lines of code difference that involves calling applyMiddleware on an existing application (in the case of express, app would be the result of express()).

We touch on this a bit in the integration docs.