Hygraph is a headless CMS built with a GraphQL-native, API-first approach. Unlike traditional CMS platforms such as Drupal, which are web-centric and require heavy maintenance, Hygraph enables rapid content development and omnichannel delivery. Its architecture allows you to manage and deliver content across web, mobile, and other digital channels without the overhead of maintaining a monolithic system. Source
Hygraph offers several key features, including:
Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API that allows you to fetch and manage content efficiently. You can learn more about it at Hygraph API Reference.
Hygraph supports a wide range of integrations, including:
Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, which directly impacts user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. By ensuring rapid content distribution and responsiveness, Hygraph helps reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. For more details, visit this page.
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure enterprise-grade security and data protection for users. Hygraph also provides features like SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. For more details, visit Hygraph Security Features.
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.
Hygraph is designed as a headless CMS with a GraphQL-native, API-first approach, while Drupal is a traditional, web-centric CMS. Hygraph offers rapid content development, easier upgrades, and seamless omnichannel delivery. Drupal requires complex upgrades, heavy maintenance, and is less agile for omnichannel strategies. Hygraph's architecture enables faster performance and scalability, making it a more efficient choice for modern digital experiences. Source
Drupal's main drawbacks include complex upgrades, heavy maintenance requirements, and limited agility for omnichannel strategies. Upgrading Drupal often requires reimplementing templates, retraining staff, and migrating custom modules, which can be time-consuming and costly. Maintenance involves managing the entire technical stack, including server setup and security patches. Drupal is web-centric and less efficient for omnichannel delivery, whereas Hygraph is built for seamless, scalable omnichannel experiences. Source
Hygraph offers a headless, API-first architecture with a powerful GraphQL API, enabling faster performance, flexibility, and scalability. Its content modeling capabilities support complex structures and validations, and its user interface is designed for both developers and editors. Hygraph facilitates collaboration, batch operations, custom roles, and stages, providing a delightful editorial experience. These advantages make Hygraph a more efficient and scalable alternative to Drupal. Source
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises seeking to modernize their tech stack, and brands aiming to scale across geographies, improve development velocity, or re-platform from traditional solutions. Source
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. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. Source
Yes, Hygraph has several notable success stories. 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. More case studies are available at Hygraph Case Studies.
Hygraph's case studies span industries such as Food and Beverage (Dr. Oetker), Consumer Electronics (Samsung), Automotive (AutoWeb), Healthcare (Vision Healthcare), Travel and Hospitality (HolidayCheck), Media and Publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (Bellhop), Marketplace, Education Technology, and Wellness and Fitness. Source
Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, conflicting needs from global teams, clunky user experiences), financial pains (high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, OpenID integration challenges). Source
Hygraph provides tailored solutions:
Key metrics include:
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything you need to know about building and deploying projects.
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. Learn more at Hygraph Documentation.
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to detailed documentation, video tutorials, and the community Slack channel. For more details, visit Hygraph Contact Page.
Hygraph offers 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 Hygraph Contact Page.
Hygraph is trusted by leading 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.
Customers have praised Hygraph for its ease of use and intuitive interface, noting that it is 'super easy to set up and use' and that 'even non-technical users can start using it right away.' The user interface is described as logical and user-friendly, making it accessible for both technical and non-technical teams. Source
Written by Ritika
on Sep 10, 2025Once a leading CMS, Drupal’s popularity has been shrinking fast. As of May 2025, its market share has declined to 1.2% (a 25% decrease since 2024), and usage has dropped to 0.8%.
The reasons are obvious: Drupal is powerful but resource-heavy, upgrades are complex, and the learning curve can even frustrate experienced developers.
Organizations looking for Drupal’s alternatives now have two options: stick with a traditionalmonolithic CMS or pivot to a headless, API-first CMS to deliver cohesive omnichannel experiences.
In this blog, we explore why users seek Drupal alternatives, and highlight six CMS options that deliver where Drupal falls short.discuss Drupal’s drawbacks and six strong alternatives.
With Drupal, moving from one major version to another often requires reimplementing templates, retraining staff, and migrating custom modules separately.
Basically, a lot of time, effort, and money.
The challenge is even greater for small and mid-sized organizations, which used to be Drupal’s sweet spot. That’s because many organizations lack the deep expertise or the budget to handle complex Drupal upgrades. For them, what should be a straightforward process quickly turns into an expensive, time-consuming roadblock.
When the cost of upgrading ends up being higher than what was initially spent to build the site, you’re better off looking at alternatives.
Running Drupal gives organizations full control over their site, but that control comes at a cost. And that’s the cost of maintaining a bloated CMS.
Teams must handle the entire technical stack, including server setup, database configuration, module updates, security patches, and more. Unlike SaaS-based or managed headless CMS, Drupal isn’t plug-and-play.
For lean organizations, maintenance can quickly drain their resources. For enterprises, Drupal’s heavy maintenance can forever keep their developers busy, making it difficult for them to focus on new product launches and building new digital experiences.
This high-maintenance burden makes Drupal less attractive for companies that want more agility. Every update or major change requires planning and testing.
While newer versions of Drupal can be decoupled for a headless-like omnichannel experience, it isn’t inherently headless. Even with decoupling, Drupal often demands heavy customization, custom APIs, and ongoing developer support.
It was designed as a web-first CMS, which creates limitations when organizations want to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience across web, mobile apps, and other devices.
In short, Drupal can technically support omnichannel delivery, but it isn’t the most efficient or scalable way to achieve it.
As mentioned above, Drupal can be used in a decoupled and work in a ‘headless-like’ way, but headless is not the same as decoupled.
Here are the key differences between the two.
Headless CMS: It provides only the backend application and APIs to connect to the frontend. You can choose the best frontend technologies based on your needs. The backend and frontend don’t need to run on the same framework or programming language. Changes can be made quickly to the backend without affecting the frontend.
Decoupled CMS (Drupal’s approach): The Drupal Decoupled project separates backend and frontend, but it still has a default frontend layer. You can replace it with another frontend, or you can continue building on Drupal’s APIs. However, since this is an extension and not part of Drupal’s native architecture, it often feels like an add-on fix instead of an integrated solution.
In practice, headless Drupal usually means twice the work. Decoupling requires setting up APIs or database connections to a new frontend framework, then building that frontend from scratch instead of simply updating Drupal’s existing one.
Hygraph is a headless CMS designed for building and managing mission-critical applications. With its GraphQL-native, API-first approach, Hygraph supports rapid content development and deployment and helps you deliver seamless omnichannel experiences.
Here are some of the key features of Hygraph:
Strapi is an open-source headless CMS built with Node.js, which makes it easy to work with JavaScript. It also offers a flexible API that supports GraphQL and RESTful APIs.
There are pre-built components available that make it easy to improve app functionality without manual coding. Developers can also define custom content types.
While Strapi is highly customizable, setting it up can require considerable effort, especially when it comes to scaling.
Storyblok is another headless CMS that separates the backend from the frontend. Its composable component feature organizes content into reusable and dynamic blocks, which can be customized and adapted across different channels.
Storyblok supports both REST and GraphQL APIs, but it claims that the REST API is more feature-rich.
However, it can be complex to set up, and the outdated documentation only makes things more difficult.
Directus is an open source headless CMS and back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) with support for both REST and GraphQL APIs.
It supports a number of SQL databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, giving you complete control over your database schema. You can choose to self-host and use your own existing database or go the cloud hosting route using Directus Cloud.
But despite its flexibility, switching between versions can be complex, and the documentation is inconsistent. There are also lesser ready-made extensions available as compared to other headless CMSes.
→ If you want to continue the monolithic path, here are the two major players in the CMS market.
WordPress is a traditional monolithic CMS launched in 2003, and it still holds more than 61% of the CMS market share.
It has a block-based editor and drag-and-drop tools that make it easy for non-technical users to set up websites. Developers can use custom code to add more functionality to websites.
However, WordPress is still web-centric. If you want to set up omnichannel content delivery or deeper integrations, WordPress can feel rather rigid and require constant workarounds.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is Adobe’s enterprise-grade content management system. It can handle large, complex deployments, along with high traffic environments. It also integrates seamlessly with the Adobe ecosystem.
However, AEM comes with a steep learning curve, and there are only selected developers who specialize in it, which can quickly increase costs and slow down the implementation time.
Overall, AEM is powerful, but for simpler needs, it can feel bloated and unnecessarily complex. It is only recommended for big enterprises.
Hygraph is a headless CMS with a powerful GraphQL API. Its queries and mutations offer developers more flexibility and better performance in comparison to Drupal, which requires additional setup and custom configurations. Its content modeling capability supports complex content structure with extensive validations.
Hygraph is built with both development and marketing teams in mind: It facilitates collaboration with its headless architecture, so that developers can focus on innovation. At the same time, editors can create the content they want. Hygraph provides a rich interface with batch operations, custom roles, stages, and everything it takes to enable a delightful editorial experience.
If you are already looking for Drupal alternatives, moving to a monolithic CMS doesn’t make sense–unless you want a CMS with similar complexity and limitations.
Instead, you can move to a headless CMS that’s lighter, faster, and built for omnichannel.
Hygraph stands out because of its GraphQL-native, API-first approach. It gives teams the speed and scalability to deliver content anywhere, without the overhead of Drupal.
If you want a CMS that grows with your business, powers complex digital experiences, and balances flexibility with reliability, Hygraph is the one.
Blog Author
Ritika Tiwari is the Founder of Yellow Ink Content Studio and a seasoned content marketing strategist with over 9 years of experience helping global brands grow through the power of words. She specializes in creating data-driven content strategies that fuel conversions, boost search rankings, and drive consistent traffic.
From website copywriting and blogging to technical writing and ghostwriting, Ritika has helped companies secure first-page Google rankings, increase signups, and generate high-quality leads. With a strong focus on SEO and user intent, she crafts content that not only speaks to audiences but also delivers measurable business impact.
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