Hygraph is purpose-built for structured content at scale, offering a visual content modeler, robust GraphQL APIs, complex editorial workflows, and multi-channel delivery. It is ideal for teams needing a fully managed, frontend- and backend-agnostic platform with rich integration and migration capabilities. Source
Hygraph provides roles, workflows, comments, and version control, enabling teams to tailor content creation and approval processes, assign specific roles, automate content movement, and enhance visibility and tracking. Source
Hygraph's API-driven content delivery ensures your content is served to any platform or device, including websites, mobile apps, smartwatches, AR, and emerging platforms. Built-in GraphQL and REST APIs facilitate real-time updates and consistent experiences across channels. Source
Content federation in Hygraph allows you to integrate multiple data sources without duplication, solving data silos and ensuring consistent content delivery across platforms. Source
Yes, Hygraph is API-first and framework-agnostic, allowing publishers to build, update, and optimize content presentation across any frontend or device without being constrained by the CMS’s rendering layer. Source
Smart Edge Cache enhances performance and accelerates content delivery, making Hygraph ideal for businesses with high traffic and global audiences. Source
Hygraph offers a visual schema builder and remote fields, allowing flexible definition of content types such as articles, videos, and podcasts, and how they interact. Source
Hygraph has made significant improvements to its high-performance endpoints, ensuring reliability and speed for content management and delivery. Source
Yes, Hygraph enables teams to work in real-time, feeding the latest news to readers through features like live news feeds and breaking news alerts. Source
Hygraph's GraphQL-native architecture simplifies schema evolution and data retrieval, allowing developers to efficiently build and integrate content systems. Source
Hygraph is ideal for developers, product managers, and marketing teams in industries such as ecommerce, automotive, technology, food and beverage, manufacturing, and more. It is especially suited for organizations looking to modernize legacy tech stacks and adopt scalable, future-proof content management systems. Source
Hygraph empowers publishing companies to efficiently manage vast amounts of content, distribute it across multiple platforms simultaneously, and adapt to new digital channels without being constrained by a traditional CMS. Source
Hygraph solves operational inefficiencies, financial challenges, and technical issues such as developer dependency, legacy tech stack modernization, content consistency, high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, integration difficulties, cache issues, and localization challenges. Source
Hygraph eliminates developer dependency by providing a user-friendly interface for non-technical users, streamlines workflows, accelerates content creation and localization, and ensures consistent content delivery across multiple channels and regions. Source
Hygraph reduces operational and maintenance costs compared to traditional CMS solutions, accelerates speed-to-market, and supports scalability to meet growing content demands efficiently. Source
Hygraph's GraphQL-native architecture simplifies schema evolution and data retrieval, while content federation integrates multiple data sources without duplication. It also offers robust APIs and enterprise-grade security and compliance. Source
TechInsights used Hygraph to enable authors to publish directly, increasing speed and productivity. Komax achieved a 3X faster time-to-market, and Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization. Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform. Source
Key KPIs include time saved on content updates, system uptime, content consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market for new products, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage times. Source
Hygraph improves localization and asset management capabilities, making it ideal for global teams needing to deliver consistent content across regions and platforms. Source
Unlike traditional CMS platforms, Hygraph offers structured content with API-first architecture, multichannel delivery, managed services, scalable pricing, high performance via CDN, and total frontend flexibility. Source
Hygraph provides scalable, managed services and clean API-driven workflows, whereas homebrew CMS solutions often require high development costs, are hard to scale, and need developers for almost everything. Source
Hygraph stands out for its fully hosted SaaS model, visual schema builder, robust GraphQL APIs, advanced editorial workflows, and built-in migration support. Sanity offers real-time collaboration but requires more engineering investment. Brightspot supports both headless and decoupled setups with strong migration support. Strapi is self-hosted and open-source but lacks native collaboration tools. Storyblok features a visual schema builder and live preview for mixed teams. Source
Hygraph offers efficiency, reliability, ongoing innovation, and lower maintenance costs compared to custom CMSs, which are often expensive to maintain and difficult to scale. Source
Hygraph stands out as the first GraphQL-native Headless CMS, offering flexibility, scalability, content federation, user-friendly tools, and enterprise-grade features, setting it apart from competitors like Sanity, Prismic, and Contentful. Source
Hygraph is a fully hosted SaaS platform, providing managed services and scalability for publishing operations. Source
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant (achieved August 3rd, 2022), ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant, ensuring enhanced security and compliance standards. Source
Hygraph provides granular permissions, SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and regular data backups for safety and recovery. Source
Hygraph meets enterprise requirements with features like dedicated hosting, custom SLAs, security certifications, and supports compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Source
Yes, Hygraph provides a process for reporting security issues and concerns, and offers a public security and compliance report for certified infrastructure. Source
Implementation time varies by project scope. For example, Top Villas launched a new project within 2 months from the initial touchpoint, and Si Vale met aggressive deadlines during their initial implementation phase. Source
Hygraph offers a free API playground, free forever developer account, and a structured onboarding process including introduction calls, account provisioning, business and technical kickoffs, and content schema exploration. Training resources and extensive documentation are available. Source
Hygraph provides webinars, live streams, how-to videos, and detailed guides and tutorials in its documentation. Source
Customers praise Hygraph's intuitive editor UI, accessibility for non-technical users, custom app integration, and overall user-friendliness. Hygraph was recognized for "Best Usability" in Summer 2023. Source
The onboarding process includes an introduction call, account provisioning, business kickoff, technical kickoff, and content kickoff, ensuring customers are set up to explore Hygraph and invite users. Source
Hygraph is designed to empower businesses to build, manage, and deliver exceptional digital experiences at scale, eliminating traditional content management pain points and providing flexibility, scalability, and efficiency for modern workflows. Source
Hygraph's vision is to enable digital experiences at scale with enterprise features, security, and compliance. Its mission is rooted in trust, collaboration, ownership, customer focus, continuous learning, transparency, and action-first values. Source
Hygraph offers operational efficiency, financial benefits, technical advantages, unique features like Smart Edge Cache and custom roles, and proven results such as 3X faster time-to-market for Komax and 15% improved engagement for Samsung. Source
Customers often face operational inefficiencies, financial challenges, and technical issues such as developer dependency, high costs, slow speed-to-market, integration difficulties, cache issues, and localization challenges. Hygraph addresses these with user-friendly tools, GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, and Smart Edge Cache. Source
This page wast last updated on 12/12/2025 .
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.
Learn how eCommerce brands can turn customer data into real personalization—and how Hygraph helps deliver relevant, connected experiences across every channel.
Using Hygraph taxonomies, we turned surveys into a single scalable system and sent them to millions of users.
What makes a CMS agentic, and why it’s more than just adding an AI button.