Hygraph offers a flexible pricing model to suit different needs. There is a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans for larger organizations. For full details, visit the Hygraph pricing page.
Hygraph provides a visual schema builder, GraphQL-native APIs, advanced editorial workflows (roles, workflows, comments), multi-channel delivery, and rich integration and migration capabilities. It is designed for structured content at scale and supports complex publishing operations. Learn more at the Hygraph Features page.
Yes, Hygraph offers integrations with platforms such as Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. For a full list, visit the Hygraph Integrations page.
Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. You can learn more about its capabilities at the Hygraph API Reference.
Hygraph includes features such as version control, approval workflows, role-based access, comments, and content assignment. These tools enable teams to collaborate efficiently, even across different locations. For more details, see Content Workflows.
Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, ensuring rapid distribution and responsiveness. This leads to improved user experience, higher engagement, and better search engine rankings. For more information, visit this page.
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers enterprise-grade security features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. For more details, visit the Hygraph Security Features page.
Hygraph stands out with its fully hosted SaaS model, API-first and framework-agnostic approach, visual schema builder, advanced editorial workflows, and built-in GraphQL & REST APIs for multi-channel delivery. Compared to platforms like Sanity, Brightspot, Strapi, and Storyblok, Hygraph offers strong integration and migration capabilities, making it ideal for teams needing a managed, scalable solution. For a detailed comparison, see the feature table in the Best CMS for publishers blog post.
Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a fully managed SaaS platform. It reduces reliance on developers, lowers operational costs, accelerates speed-to-market, and supports multi-channel publishing. These advantages make it a strong choice over traditional or custom CMS solutions. Learn more at the Hygraph product page.
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It serves modern software companies, enterprises looking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or improve development velocity. For more details, see the Hygraph Case Studies.
Hygraph's case studies span industries such as Food and Beverage, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality, Media and Publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, Marketplace, Education Technology, and Wellness and Fitness. Explore more at Hygraph Case Studies.
Yes. For example, Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. See more success stories at the Hygraph product page.
Customers can expect time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf
Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers, outdated tech stacks, conflicting global team needs, clunky content creation), financial pains (high costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache and integration issues). For more details, visit the Hygraph product page.
For developers, Hygraph reduces boilerplate code and streamlines query management. For content creators and project managers, it provides an intuitive interface for independent content updates. For business stakeholders, Hygraph lowers operational costs, supports scalability, and accelerates speed-to-market. Solutions are tailored to each persona's needs. Learn more at the Hygraph product page.
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, system uptime, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more details, visit the Hygraph blog on CMS KPIs.
Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and use resources like documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Learn more at the Hygraph Documentation.
Hygraph provides comprehensive technical documentation covering all aspects of building and deploying projects. Access it at the Hygraph Documentation page.
Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users can access documentation, video tutorials, and the community Slack channel. For more details, visit the Hygraph Contact Page.
Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. For more details, visit the Hygraph Contact Page.
Hygraph offers 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, and all users can access documentation and the community Slack channel for additional support. Source: Hygraph Contact
Hygraph's primary purpose is to unify data and enable content federation, allowing businesses to create impactful digital experiences. It leverages a GraphQL-native architecture to remove traditional content management pain points, offering scalability, flexibility, and efficient data querying. Source: About Us
Customers praise Hygraph for its ease of use and intuitive interface. Feedback includes comments like 'super easy to set up and use,' and 'even non-technical users can start using it right away.' The interface is described as logical and user-friendly for both technical and non-technical teams. Source: Try Hygraph
Hygraph is trusted by companies such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more details, visit Hygraph Case Studies.
Written by Nikola
on Aug 01, 2025Traditional page builders are built for blogs and not for quick-paced publishing operations that scale wide and deliver content across channels. Traditional tools like WordPress struggle with structured content, complex editorial workflows, and multi-frontend delivery.
Modern publishing companies need a CMS that supports collaboration, reusable content, API-first delivery, and performance at scale.
This article explains why legacy and homegrown systems fall short and which modern CMSs are actually built for the publishing business.
Publishing companies come in all shapes and sizes. Their success largely depends on setting up effective content operations. Here are some of the most common types, each with its own unique set of challenges and priorities. See which one sounds most like your team.
These sites act as digital newsstands, providing timely news, expert opinions, and information about current events in a variety of formats like articles, videos, and multimedia. Examples include BBC and The New York Times.
Research sites like PubMed or ResearchGate are platforms for information gathering, resource sharing, and collaboration in academic and professional settings. They provide access to scholarly articles, research papers, data, statistics, and other resources.
Insight sites provide valuable information and analysis in different fields, from consumer research and data-driven marketing to UX research or website tracking. Examples include TechInsights and Wynter.
Market intelligence sites help businesses understand their market, customers, and competitors, so they can make better strategic decisions. Examples include Crayon, G2, and Crunchbase.
Content is the core product of any publishing business. That content is often complex, with all sorts of data points, graphics, and sensitive information. Simple page builders like WordPress or Joomla can’t meet such demands.
Here are the biggest reasons why a traditional CMS is a bad choice for publishing sites:
Sounds familiar? Here’s an in-depth article where we explore challenges that publishing organizations face and offer solutions to overcome them.
Many publishing businesses start with a homebrew CMS to stay closely aligned with internal workflows. But with time, we’ve seen a wave of news sites abandoning in-house CMSs for more agile systems that cost less to maintain and are easier to scale.
A few quick examples: Vox Media decided to ditch Chorus, its proprietary CMS, in favor of WordPress VIP. Hubbard Broadcasting, a 50-station-strong media network, also left its legacy publishing infrastructure for WordPress on Pantheon. The third example is Morning Brew, a tech media company that replaced its unscalable in-house CMS with Sanity.
This trend is worth noting, as publishing companies are increasingly weighing the hidden costs of maintaining custom CMSs against the efficiency, reliability, and ongoing innovation offered by SaaS platforms built and maintained by CMS specialists.
Let’s look at how the three main CMS types stack against each other from the publishers’ point of view.
| Features | Traditional CMS | Homebrew CMS | Headless CMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content reusability | Tightly coupled to templates and themes | Custom solutions possible, but hard to scale | Structured content with API-first architecture |
| Content delivery | Web-first, limited support for other channels | Web-first, custom integrations needed for other channels | Multichannel by design: web, mobile, apps, syndication |
| IT dependency / maintenance | Frequent plugin updates and server upkeep | Developers needed for (almost) everything | Managed services and clean API-driven workflows |
| Price | Low upfront, but high long-term TCO | High development cost, gets even higher over time | Scalable pricing; costs tied to usage and complexity |
| Performance | Often slower due to plugin bloat and monolithic setup | Varies — often not optimized for scale | High — frontend decoupled from CMS, fast global delivery via CDN |
| Frontend flexibility | Tightly coupled themes, limited design freedom | Customizable but tied to legacy stacks | Total freedom — any frontend or device |
Editor's Note
For those in the later stages of evaluating traditional, custom, and headless CMS platforms, our eBook offers a complete guide to finding the best-fit solution for your use case.
Download eBook: The CMS Choice: Monolith, Custom, or Headless
As we’ve seen, when you’re running a high-volume, multi-author, even multiple-market publishing operation, the wrong CMS doesn’t just slow you down. It creates bottlenecks and silos all over editorial, design, and engineering.
Here’s what your CMS should offer to help your teams create content architecture for advanced publishing that can scale without rework.
A headless CMS allows publishers to build, update, and optimize content presentation across frontends without being constrained by the CMS’s rendering layer. The ideal CMS for publishers should adapt to any device and recognize when the user is on mobile, desktop, or any other type of display.
Look for a CMS that lets editors quickly recreate content from writing tools without worrying about reformatting. Other intuitive functions include tracking changes, comments, built-in spelling and grammar checkers, and media embeds.
Version control, approval workflows, and role-based access ensure that your team works smoothly even in different locations. This includes everything from content assignment to editorial review and final publication.
For example, Hygraph has recently introduced Content Workflows, a set of features that allow teams to tailor content creation and approval to their unique processes, assign specific roles, automate content movement, enhance visibility and tracking, and more.
Your CMS should let you define different content types, such as articles, videos, and podcasts. The point is that you should have the freedom to work with any type of content, define how they interact with each other, and perform as you expect. For example, many teams still rely on plugins like Yoast SEO in WordPress or seek out platforms with built-in SEO features, while a more strategic approach is to create your own SEO component tailored to your specific content structure and business goals.
Your CMS should enable your team to work in real-time, feeding the latest news to your reader base. Features like life news feeds and breaking news alerts help you inform readers about the most important updates.
TechInsights, a leading tech B2B information platform, for example, uses AI-inspired publishing strategies to free authors from only hitting the “publish” button when everything is ready. Instead, they’ve built blocks to create content incrementally, cutting the time to publishing.
BioCentury, another publishing company, relies on Hygraph’s Content Federation to fetch live data from remote sources via APIs.
Find out more about the current trends that shape the future of B2B publishing content operations.
API-driven content delivery keeps your content served to any platform or device. Your audience gets the same experience and real-time content updates whether on a website, mobile app, smartwatch, AR, or any emerging platform.
| Feature | Hygraph | Sanity | Brightspot | Strapi | Storyblok |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Fully hosted SaaS | Fully hosted (Sanity Studio on client infrastructure optional) | Cloud & private deployment options | Self-hosted by default (requires setup) | Fully hosted SaaS |
| Frontend flexibility | API-first, framework-agnostic | API-first, frontend agnostic | Supports headless and decoupled | Frontend-agnostic | API-first, Vue/Nuxt starter-friendly |
| Content modeling | Visual schema builder + remote fields | Code-based, real-time updates | Visual modeling + flexible schema | UI-based and code-based | Visual schema builder |
| Collaboration features | Roles, workflows, comments | Real-time collaboration, presence, revision history | Advanced editorial tools (workflows, versioning) | Basic role-based auth | Comments, roles, workflows |
| Cross-device compatible | Headless content via API | JSON-based content supports any device | Web, mobile, OTT, voice platforms | API-ready for any frontend | Works across platforms |
| Multi-channel delivery | Built-in GraphQL & REST APIs | Real-time API, integrates with CDNs | Supports multi-site, multi-format delivery | REST & GraphQL support | API-based delivery |
| Support for migration | CLI tools + APIs + partner support | CLI tools, plugins, and API access | White-glove onboarding & migration tools | Manual or custom scripts needed | Migration CLI + APIs |
Hygraph is purpose-built for structured content at scale. It combines a visual content modeler with capable GraphQL APIs, supports complex editorial workflows, and excels at multi-channel delivery. Best fit for teams that need a fully managed, frontend- and backend-agnostic platform with rich integration and migration capabilities.
Hygraph effectively allowed us to change our processes, allowing us to have authors publish directly, which was never before possible. Everything before had to go through publishing. That is speed, that is productivity.
Sanity comes with great collaboration and real-time editing features, but it requires more engineering investment upfront. Great for teams that want to customize deeply and are comfortable managing their own Sanity Studio.
Brightspot supports both headless and decoupled setups, with editorial tools out of the box. It offers strong migration support and flexible deployment options, making it ideal for large enterprise publishers.
Strapi offers good content modeling and API delivery but lacks native collaboration tools and out-of-the-box scalability. Suitable for teams with in-house devs who value open technology stacks.
Storyblok’s visual schema builder and live preview appeal to content teams, while APIs allow for flexible frontend development. It's a good choice for media companies with mixed technical and non-technical users.
The needs of modern publishers have outgrown traditional CMSs — whether you're managing a high-volume newsroom, a research portal, or an industry insights hub.
Headless CMSs are designed for speed, scale, and complexity, making your publishing ops future-proof.
Find out more about how Hygraph can help you build your information products smarter by federating content dynamically across sources and unifying content through metadata.
And structured content is more sustainable in the AI era.
Compare top headless CMS options to find a faster, more flexible, and cost-effective solution for your content needs.
Explore 10 powerful AI tools for web development that streamline coding, design, and content workflows to free up your team for more creative tasks.