A composable CMS is a content management system that structures content as modular blocks, allowing reuse across any frontend channel. It breaks up functionality into modular services, making it easy to integrate with other systems. Hygraph spearheads this category by combining a headless architecture with a flexible, modular platform. Source
How does a composable CMS differ from a headless CMS?
Both headless and composable CMSs separate the backend from the frontend and deliver content via APIs. A headless CMS manages structured content and exposes it through APIs, while a composable CMS goes further by decoupling backend services themselves. This allows you to swap out or extend functionality (e.g., replace the media service) without replatforming the whole CMS. Source
What are the core building blocks of a composable CMS?
The key elements are modular content models (reusable components rather than page-based content), microservices-based architecture (each function runs independently), API-first design (everything accessible via APIs), and customization tools that let you tailor workflows and integrations. These blocks allow you to assemble a CMS that fits your business needs. Source
Features & Capabilities
What features does Hygraph offer?
Hygraph provides a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, modular content modeling, scalability, and API-first design. It supports integrations with tools for hosting, eCommerce, localization, digital asset management, personalization, and AI. Hygraph is MACH-certified and built to power composable digital experiences. Source
What integrations are available with Hygraph?
Hygraph offers integrations with 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 Hygraph Integrations.
Does Hygraph provide an API?
Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. Learn more at Hygraph API Reference.
How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?
Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, ensuring rapid content distribution and responsiveness. This reduces bounce rates and increases conversions, directly impacting user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Source
Security & Compliance
What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?
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 Hygraph Security Features.
Pricing & Plans
What is Hygraph's pricing model?
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For more details, visit the pricing page.
Use Cases & Benefits
Who can benefit from Hygraph?
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. Companies that benefit most include modern software companies, enterprises looking to modernize technologies, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or re-platform from traditional solutions. Source
What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?
Customers can expect significant business impacts, including time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market for digital products, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. Source
What problems does Hygraph solve?
Hygraph solves problems such as reducing reliance on developers for content updates, modernizing legacy tech stacks, addressing conflicting needs of global teams, and improving user experience for content creation. Financially, it lowers operational costs, speeds up time-to-market, and supports scalability. Technically, it simplifies development workflows, streamlines query management, and resolves cache and integration challenges. Source
What are some real-world examples of companies using Hygraph?
Brands like Telenor use Hygraph to programmatically add 2,000 videos to their streaming platform each month. Dr. Oetker manages and localizes marketing channels for a portfolio of brands across 40 markets. 2U brings together content from over 500 data sources to deliver online education globally. For more, see Hygraph Case Studies.
What industries are represented in Hygraph's 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. Source
Technical Requirements & Implementation
How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?
Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and use resources like documentation and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from the initial touchpoint. Documentation, Case Study
What technical documentation is available for Hygraph?
Hygraph offers comprehensive technical documentation covering everything needed to build and deploy projects. Access it at Hygraph Documentation.
Support & Training
What customer service or support is available after purchasing Hygraph?
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. Contact Page
What training and technical support is available to help customers get started?
Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, 24/7 support, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. Contact Page
Customer Proof & Success Stories
Who are some of Hygraph's customers?
Hygraph is trusted by brands 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.
Can you share specific case studies or success stories of customers using Hygraph?
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. Explore more at Hygraph Product Page.
Competition & Comparison
Why choose Hygraph over alternatives in the market?
Hygraph offers a unique GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, and scalability. It enables businesses to create impactful digital experiences while reducing costs and improving efficiency. For more details, visit the product page.
How does Hygraph compare to monolithic CMS platforms?
Monolithic CMSs provide prebuilt templates and work out-of-the-box but are rigid and risky to customize at scale. Hygraph's composable architecture allows incremental modernization, flexible integrations, and avoids costly rip-and-replace cycles, making it better suited for growing digital businesses. Source
KPIs & Metrics
What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, number of updates made without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI on CMS investment, time to market for new products, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more details, visit CMS KPIs Blog.
In this article, we explain what a composable CMS is, how it differs from monolithic and headless systems, and why it matters for modern digital business. We’ll walk you through its building blocks—modular content, API-first design, scalability, and integrations—and show how Hygraph helps teams future-proof their digital experience with composability at the core.
Monolithic CMSs lock teams into rigid templates and create scaling risks.
Headless CMS improves flexibility but often lacks modular services for complex needs.
A composable CMS structures content as reusable modules and integrates via APIs.
It enables omnichannel delivery, data unification, and continuous adaptability.
Hygraph is GraphQL-native, MACH-certified, and built to power composable digital experiences.
Companies that want scalability and resilience are moving from headless to composable CMS with Hygraph.
Ready to jump right in?
Build connected, scalable content with the #1 easiest-to-implement headless CMS.
A composable CMS is a content management system that structures your content as modular blocks that can be reused on any frontend channel, and breaks up functionality into modular services so that it's easy to integrate the CMS with other systems. In practice, that means content creators are free to design and reuse structured content, while developers compose best‑of‑breed services for media, search and personalisation. Hygraph spearheads this category by combining the robustness of a headless architecture with the flexibility of a modular platform.
The popularity of composable CMSs has risen alongside the scope of digital business. As companies look to use more types of digital content, in more unique ways, across more customer touchpoints, many teams are finding out that the limitations of their legacy CMS are a big barrier to their best ideas. Moving to a modular, composable CMS gives these teams a lot more flexibility in how they structure, create, reuse, integrate and scale their online content. That’s why organisations such as Samsung, Telenor and 2U rely on Hygraph to build digital experience platforms (DXPs) that evolve with their business.
This article looks at the building blocks of a composable CMS and where it sits on the spectrum of content solutions available on the market today. From all‑in‑one platforms that provide prebuilt templates for simple sites, to headless CMSs built for multichannel content, to composable CMSs that evolve the headless model to support more complex business needs.
As an overall approach to technology, like when talking about composable commerce, composability is the idea that instead of being locked into a set of features from a single vendor suite, companies should be able to compose their own tech stack of best‑of‑breed tools for each part of digital. For this to work, the technologies in their stack must be adaptable, API‑first and easy to integrate.
A composable CMS is the latest evolution in designing content systems to support this big‑picture composable approach. When comparing common types of CMSs available on the market:
Monolithic CMS – The way most CMSs were designed in the early days of online business. Web and mobile page templates are provided out‑of‑the‑box, and content is organized in a page-based way. The frontend and backend are managed as one big application, and features are highly dependent on each other, which makes customisations and integrations with third‑party tools difficult.
Headless CMS – A backend‑only solution that delivers content via APIs to any frontend channel. Content data is highly structured so that each channel can decide what data to use and how to present it. This allows teams to reuse content and more efficiently manage multichannel strategies. Headless architecture also makes it easier to integrate APIs from different systems into the frontend experience.
Composable CMS – A headless CMS that also breaks up backend functionality into microservices. Each service works independently, exposes all data via APIs, and can be updated or replaced without disrupting the others. This modularity gives teams a lot of flexibility when it comes to integrations and adapting the CMS to support complex use cases. Hygraph was built with this architecture from day one, so you can easily connect your favourite DAM, commerce engine or personalisation tool without vendor lock‑in.
Monolithic CMSs have remained popular for a reason. They provide prebuilt website templates, work out‑of‑the‑box, and don't require a lot of technical knowledge to get started with. This makes them a really good option for personal projects and small businesses (and even some very large businesses) where all that's needed is a simple, static website.
However, as online business grows, it is less likely that all of a company's digital needs can be covered by a one‑size‑fits‑all CMS or by any type of stand‑alone platform. This is why teams are increasingly choosing to create their own digital experience platform (DXP) out of a variety of tools and services that are best fit for each need. In other words, a composable DXP.
The same architecture that makes monolithic CMSs easy to get started with is also what makes them ill‑suited for this composable approach. To be able to work out of the box, the features and templates of a monolith are designed to work together in a very specific way. This means that a small change to one part of the website or content creation process can lead to a cascade of unexpected errors throughout the application. This makes integrations and other customisations complex, hard to scale, and often feel too risky to even try.
Some use cases simply don't need more than a monolithic CMS, but any company planning on ramping up digital business is likely to outgrow these types of solutions. Putting in a little extra effort to implement a composable CMS now can save teams a lot of time and headaches down the road as they expand and experiment with the digital experience. Hygraph’s API‑first platform is designed for this reality, giving you flexibility today and agility tomorrow.
Headless architecture decouples the frontend from the backend, empowering teams to deliver structured content to any device. A composable CMS builds on that foundation by decoupling the backend itself. While a headless CMS manages all your content in one application, a composable CMS breaks apart services like asset management, workflows and search into independent microservices. You can swap out or upgrade any service without rebuilding the entire stack.
For example, you might start with Hygraph’s built‑in media library and later decide to use a specialised digital asset management (DAM) tool for video content. A composable CMS lets you make this switch with a few simple API changes instead of requiring you to refactor the entire system. This flexibility is what makes composable so appealing to digital product teams.
As composable becomes a more popular approach, it also becomes a more popular marketing term. While there are no strict criteria that software has to meet to claim it's composable, here are general areas to look at to evaluate just how well a CMS is going to support a modular, best‑of‑breed tech stack.
Editor's Note
The MACH Alliance, an organization that advocates for the composable enterprise, does provide a set of criteria to certify that software follows the MACH technology principles (microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, headless) that support composable architectures. All MACH solutions are composable, but not all composable solutions are fully MACH. Learn More
Content modeling
Instead of organising content around specific web pages, a composable CMS structures content as modular components. These components are repeated blocks of content data such as product details, customer testimonials, author profiles or SEO metadata. Content editors can mix and match components to create new content, and updates to components can be done globally instead of copy‑and‑pasting changes on individual pages.
This modular structure makes it easy to adapt content to multiple channels, unique use cases and enrichment from third‑party data. It also helps teams efficiently create, translate, update and reuse content.
Modular architecture
Functionality is broken up into independent services that can be updated, changed or even replaced without disrupting other features.
For instance, you might start out using the media library that comes with the CMS and later decide to use a specialised digital asset management (DAM) tool for video content. A composable CMS lets you make this switch with a few simple API changes, instead of requiring you to refactor the entire system.
API-first design
The CMS exposes all content and data via APIs. Not only are APIs used to send data between the backend and frontend, like all headless CMSs, but backend services also communicate with one another via APIs. With everything accessible via APIs, developers can easily integrate the CMS with third‑party data and services.
Customization and scalability
A composable CMS lets teams design content models, user workflows and customer experiences around the needs of the business instead of around a monolith's strict set of templates and features.
The modularity of content and functionality offers a lot of flexibility when setting up the system and, more importantly, evolving it as needs change. It also makes it easier to reuse content, and the underlying structure and logic that power that content, to quickly scale to new channels and into new markets.
#Why composability is the future of content management
We recently spoke to industry leaders about the future of content in enterprise business and the technologies driving the top trends. Below is a quick look at how composability is enabling some of their key predictions. For the full insights, check out the ebook: 10 Experts Predict the Future of Content.
Digital product model
For business models like streaming services, online courses and industry research portals the digital content is the product. When content is the bread and butter of business, companies need a CMS that is up to the task.
“With the rise of digital product models, content is increasingly becoming the actual asset that is sold to customers instead of just the marketing offered around a product. With this, we see an increased demand of handling structured content at scale similar to a database, but with CMS functionality on top.
Managing content for such applications is fundamentally different to managing content for marketing websites. You wouldn’t build a service like Netflix with a visual page builder. You need the ability to handle complex schema structures, large amounts of traffic, a reliable API to handle the complex requests as well as modern content management workflows.”
Michael LukaszczykCEO at Hygraph
Case Study
Telenor uses structured content to programmatically add 2000 videos to their streaming platform each month. Read case study.
Omnichannel
All composable CMSs are headless, so they can deliver content via API to any digital channel a customer might use to interact with a business. From web and mobile sites, to marketplaces and portals, to smart devices and in‑store kiosks.
Technical teams have long run against the confines of monoliths and yearn for the flexibility to pair any number of frontend web and mobile applications with a unified backend data platform. Headless CMS is a critical piece in that evolution.
Technical teams have long run against the confines of monoliths and yearn for the flexibility to pair any number of frontend web and mobile applications with a unified backend data platform. Headless CMS is a critical piece in that evolution.
Ryan RoemerCEO at Nearform
The flexibility of a composable CMS gives teams more control over omnichannel content than just how it looks on different devices. The ability to reuse content, define complex workflows, and customize user permissions helps global teams efficiently manage channels for multiple brands, across multiple regions, in multiple languages from one CMS.
Case Study
Dr. Oetker uses a composable CMS to efficiently manage and localize marketing channels for a portfolio of brands across 40 markets. Read case study.
Data-driven
As customer expectations grow, companies are tasked with using more content, more data and more data sources to enrich and personalise the digital experience.
With its structured approach to content and ease of integration, a composable CMS can be used to create a central source of truth where teams can access and manage the content that lives in all their different systems without worrying about duplication or out‑of‑date information.
The harmonization aspect is crucial. It's not merely about accumulating content from different sources but ensuring coherence and consistency across the board. Harmonization helps unify content formats, languages, and structures, ensuring that regardless of the source, the information aligns and resonates with the brand's voice and values.
Markus LorenzeCommerce Consultant at datrycs
Case Study
2U uses a composable CMS to bring together content from over 500 data sources and deliver online education to students across the globe. Read case study.
Adaptability
The expectations around digital experience change too fast to stick with an old‑school approach to business software. Where it takes months to implement a solution before even starting to see results, changes get made with one‑off workarounds, and tech debt builds up for a couple of years until the software becomes a big enough barrier to change that it's time to rip‑and‑replace and start the cycle again.
A composable approach breaks this replatforming cycle and allows companies to continuously modernise their tech stack in small steps that quickly show benefits. With modular technologies, teams can add, remove or replace components in their stack without having to rewire the whole system with every change. This makes it easier to quickly add new features, retire obsolete tools and pivot to new priorities as the market shifts.
“At every level of the business technology stack, composable modularity has emerged as the foundational architecture for continuous access to adaptive change. Businesses rely on it to achieve sustainable business resilience and growth.''
Curious to learn if composable is the right move for you? Hygraph's team of solution experts have helped digital teams at companies like Samsung, Telenor, and 2U make a successful transition to composable strategies. Request a demo to learn more and see how a modern CMS could boost your business.
Launch faster with the #1 easiest-to-implement headless CMS
A composable CMS is a content management system built from modular pieces. Instead of being tied to a single vendor’s feature set, you pick best‑of‑breed services for content modelling, APIs, search or media and combine them into a tailored stack. It still delivers content through APIs like a headless CMS, but its internal services are also decoupled, making integration and evolution much easier.
Both headless and composable CMSs separate the backend from the frontend and deliver content via APIs. A headless CMS focuses on managing structured content and exposing it through APIs; a composable CMS goes further by decoupling backend services themselves. This means you can swap out or extend functionality (e.g. replace the media service) without replatforming the whole CMS.
Monolithic systems bundle templates, authoring and delivery into one application. They work well for simple websites but become rigid and risky to customise at scale. When you need to integrate multiple data sources, launch new channels or experiment quickly, a monolithic CMS often slows you down. Composable architecture lets you modernise one part at a time and avoid costly rip‑and‑replace cycles.
Yes. Because it’s API‑first, a composable CMS can feed any frontend—websites, mobile apps, kiosks, smart devices or marketplaces—with the same structured content. You create content once as modular components, then reuse and adapt it for each channel. It also supports workflows and permissions so teams across regions and brands can coordinate from a single source of truth.
The key elements are modular content models (reusable components rather than page‑based content), microservices‑based architecture (each function runs independently), API‑first design (everything accessible via APIs) and customisation tools that let you tailor workflows and integrations. Together, these blocks give you the freedom to assemble a CMS that fits your business rather than forcing your business to fit the CMS.
Not necessarily. One advantage of composability is incremental adoption. You can start by exposing your existing content via APIs, then gradually replace legacy pieces—like migrating the media library to a dedicated DAM or adding a search microservice. This step‑by‑step approach reduces risk and lets you realise benefits sooner.
Yes. The article mentions how brands like Telenor and Dr. Oetker use composable CMSs to publish thousands of videos or manage dozens of markets. Another case study describes 2U unifying content from over 500 data sources. These examples show that composable architectures scale from mid‑sized businesses to global enterprises.
With a composable approach you can federate content from multiple systems—PIMs, e‑commerce, CRM—into one API layer. That unified layer becomes a single source of truth for your content and data. It simplifies personalisation and analysis because you no longer have to sync or duplicate data across siloed platforms.
The MACH Alliance certifies vendors that adhere to Microservices‑based, API‑first, Cloud‑native, Headless principles. Its standards help buyers identify technologies truly built for composability. All MACH‑certified solutions are composable, but not all composable systems are fully MACH; use the MACH criteria as a benchmark when evaluating vendors.
Blog Author
Katie Lawson
Content Writer
Katie is a freelance writer based in Amsterdam who talks a lot about B2B SaaS and MACH technologies. She’s always looking for good book recommendations.
Share with others
Sign up for our newsletter!
Be the first to know about releases and industry news and insights.