Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native headless CMS that enables you to manage and distribute content globally. It provides a single source of truth for your content, allowing you to federate and unify fragmented data silos into one powerful GraphQL API. This helps you ship exceptional product experiences faster without relying heavily on backend resources. Learn more.
Hygraph's primary purpose is to unify data and enable content federation, empowering businesses to create impactful digital experiences. Its GraphQL-native architecture removes traditional content management pain points, offering scalability, flexibility, and efficient data querying. More details.
Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. You can learn more about the API at Hygraph API Reference.
Hygraph provides a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and optimized content delivery performance. It supports integrations with hosting, eCommerce, localization, digital asset management, personalization, AI, and more. For a full list, visit Hygraph Features and Hygraph Integrations.
Hygraph integrates 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. See all integrations.
Hygraph emphasizes rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized delivery reduces bounce rates and increases conversions. Learn more.
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For details, visit the pricing 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. More details.
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 seeking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale, improve development velocity, or re-platform from traditional solutions.
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. See case studies.
Customers can expect time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience via consistent and scalable content delivery. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency.
Yes. 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 success stories.
Hygraph addresses operational pains by empowering non-technical users, modernizing legacy tech stacks, and simplifying content management for global teams. Financially, it lowers operational costs, accelerates speed-to-market, and supports scalability. Technically, it reduces boilerplate code, streamlines query management, and resolves cache and integration challenges. Learn more.
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, system uptime, content consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. See more on CMS KPIs.
Hygraph differentiates itself with its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, and scalability. It empowers non-technical users, modernizes legacy systems, and streamlines workflows, offering advantages in flexibility, speed-to-market, and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional CMS platforms. More details.
Customers should choose Hygraph for its unique GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and ability to reduce costs and improve efficiency. These strengths enable impactful digital experiences and operational improvements. Learn more.
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything needed to build and deploy projects.
Popular tools include GraphQL Code Generator, GraphQL playground, fragments, aliases, named queries, and variables. These tools help optimize queries and speed up development. See the full list.
Install GraphQL with npm install graphql and the CLI with npm install --save-dev @graphql-codegen/cli.
Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Customers can sign up for a free account and use documentation and onboarding guides to get started quickly. Learn more.
Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone, onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources like video tutorials and webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers. Contact support.
Hygraph provides 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, and all users have access to documentation and the community Slack channel.
Hygraph is trusted by companies such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. See customer stories.
Customers have praised Hygraph for its intuitive and logical interface, stating it is 'super easy to set up and use' and accessible for both technical and non-technical users.
The Hygraph Blog provides the latest updates, developer tutorials, and essential guides to content modeling. Visit the Blog section.
The blog 'WordPress Alternatives' was authored by Jing Li, Content Marketing Manager at Hygraph.
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Last updated by Jing
on Oct 28, 2025Originally written by Jing
It's no secret that we love GraphQL at Hygraph. Over time, we see many GraphQL tools opening up new opportunities for developers, and that's why we keep updating this list every year to keep the best GraphQL tools at your fingertips.
Check out the list below if you are developing with GraphQL, and try them to make your development process more efficient.
WunderGraph
Number one on our list has to be our very own Hygraph. We’re biased, but it’s been frequently featured on other lists, too, and here’s why.
Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native headless CMS that allows you to manage and distribute content globally, providing a single source of truth to efficiently scale your content. This means you can federate and unify fragmented data silos into one powerful GraphQL API, so that you can ship exceptional product experiences faster without backend resources.
In 2025, Hygraph offers built-in AI capabilities like AI Assist for content and an agentic approach to workflows. This means you can generate and personalize content faster than ever.
For example, you can use Hygraph’s AI agents to transform unstructured inputs into structured content, automate repetitive workload, or orchestrate multi-step workflows across teams. All these AI actions are governed and transparent, which follows Hygraph’s “velocity with governance” philosophy.
Although Hygraph’s free plan gets you only up to 3 seats, users say its paid plans are pretty cheap compared to competitors.
GraphiQL is the original GraphQL IDE, and the 2.0 release makes it better than ever. This is mostly thanks to a new plugin architecture and sleek interface with handy features like explorer and autocomplete.
Maintained by the GraphQL Foundation, GraphiQL brings the new era of data querying languages to the next level by providing the necessary interface for writing, validating, and testing GraphQL queries and mutations.
The tool gives you a clean workspace to write queries, explore schemas, and see results. More importantly, unlike the now-deprecated GraphQL Playground, GraphiQL is actively maintained and secure.
Lightweight and open-source, GraphiQL 2.0 is the go-to GraphQL sandbox for many teams. One user said he uses GraphiQL because it’s as simple as it gets and has everything he needs for composing daily queries.
Formerly known as GraphCDN, Stellate offers GraphQL Edge Platform solutions that optimize and secure GraphQL APIs at the computing edge. It acts as a smart proxy or gateway for GraphQL, running at the edge to handle requests faster, more securely, and more cost-effectively.
Edge caching is one of its most popular features among developers (as well as one of the most popular GraphQL tools in our 2024 State of GraphQL Report). It allows you to speed up performance, reduce cloud costs, and prevent downtime by offloading repetitive traffic.
Stellate’s caching layer is globally distributed, so repeated queries are served in microseconds from edge servers — a lifesaver in times when real-time apps demand instant data.
Postman isn’t just for REST anymore — in 2025, this all-in-one API platform has a dedicated GraphQL client that can examine your schema from a URL, offer a friendly schema explorer, and autocomplete your queries.
The client comes with all the usual Postman niceties like environment variables and collaboration. Its built-in AI assistant called “Postbot” can even generate test scripts or help debug GraphQL calls.
With Postman, you can conveniently handle REST and GraphQL side-by-side, although some power users feel it’s missing deeper in-app schema documentation like in GraphiQL.
GraphQL Mesh is an open-source framework you can use to turn almost any data source into a unified GraphQL API, regardless of their underlying technology or protocol. Whether it’s REST endpoints, databases, or gRPC, Mesh can wrap them all by generating a GraphQL schema on the go.
You can use Mesh to avoid writing tons of glue code, for example, when bridging legacy systems or third-party APIs. Maintained by The Guild, Mesh today comes with plugins for transformations, caching, and security. This does add some complexity, but if you need to unite diverse APIs into one graph, Mesh is a solution worth checking out.
Apollo Studio is a cloud platform for managing and developing GraphQL APIs and data graphs at scale. It provides a unified hub for schemas, performance monitoring, and collaboration.
In 2025, Apollo is leading the charge into the AI arena. Its MCP (Model-Controlled Procedure) Server allows LLM-based agents to safely query GraphQL APIs. This means your graph can feed real-time data to AI assistants with proper governance. Developers appreciate Apollo’s reliable out-of-box caching, which makes it easy to build fast and performant applications.
GraphQL Voyager visualizes your GraphQL schema as an interactive graph, and it’s a great tool when designing or discussing your data model.
Voyager auto-generates a schema map where you can see types and their relationships at any time. It’s a great way for juniors or non-developers to quickly grasp the structure of a GraphQL API. With around 6,000 GitHub stars, Voyager has proven its value in the community.
This GraphQL tool is read-only and purely for visualization, so there’s no risk of someone changing data while exploring.
GraphQL Code Generator is an excellent choice for eliminating boilerplate coding. Maintained by The Guild, this tool scans your schema and queries to deliver ready-to-use code (TypeScript types, React hooks, etc.) tailored to your stack. There’s no need to manually write types for your GraphQL data, which saves time and prevents inconsistencies as your schema evolves.
Code Generator supports a wide array of plugins, keeping pace with new frameworks and needs. Thanks to end-to-end type safety for your entire application, the tool automatically creates TypeScript types from your schema and operations. This helps catch errors at build-time instead of runtime.
Insomnia is an open-source desktop application that you can use to send and test HTTP, GraphQL, and other API requests. Apart from a forever-free pricing plan, users love its minimalist UI that packs powerful features.
For GraphQL, Insomnia offers intelligent query auto-completion, schema introspection, and environment variable support to manage different configurations. It also supports syncing queries and environments for easy team collaboration.
And while many stick with Insomnia for its versatility (one tool for REST and GraphQL) and its growing library of plugins, some users believe that the platform has become bloated with features, and move to faster alternatives, such as Postman.
Altair GraphQL Client is a free, open-source GraphQL IDE with a rich feature set and appealing interface. It offers a polished UI for writing and testing queries, with tweaks like query history, environment variables, and automated headers.
Expert users appreciate advanced features such as pre-request scripting for auth tokens and the ability to compress queries. In just a few years, Altair has grown its fan base significantly — over 5,000 GitHub stars.
Altair is a popular choice because it focuses purely on GraphQL, cutting the bloat of heavier API tools. You can work on multiple queries in different windows, set headers, download responses, reload docs, etc. It also comes as an extension for Firefox and Chrome, and a Mac, Linux, and Windows app.
GraphQL Editor is a visual IDE for schema design. It lets you create and visualize a GraphQL schema using a drag-and-drop interface, and even generate a fake backend for instant testing.
By 2025, GraphQL Editor has added collaboration features like team schema libraries and real-time editing for groups. It’s a great choice for prototyping and brainstorming, and you can even deploy a mock GraphQL server straight from your design to try it out.
Although you’ll eventually implement the schema in code, GraphQL Editor streamlines the early design phase and gets everyone on the same page.
Prisma is a TypeScript-based ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) for building backends. It can auto-generate a GraphQL-friendly API layer on your database, saving you from writing tons of boilerplate resolvers.
Developers love Prisma’s strongly-typed client, which “makes Sequelize look like a joke” and how smoothly it integrates with frameworks like Next.js and Redwood.
In 2025, Prisma offers reliable migrations, flexible query APIs, and a growing ecosystem. Some users caution that very large projects can hit performance snags, but for most teams, Prisma significantly accelerates development.
WunderGraph is an open-source API developer platform that simplifies the development of full-stack applications by acting as a unified API gateway and GraphQL layer.
It auto-generates a secure GraphQL gateway for your data sources, which makes it a direct competitor to Apollo. The biggest differentiator, however, is WunderGraph’s new Cosmo platform that uses AI to integrate non-GraphQL services.
Cosmo Connect uses AI tools to automatically integrate REST, SOAP, and gRPC APIs into GraphQL Federation without costly rewrites. Basically, it lets AI handle the tedious parts of wiring up legacy APIs.
WunderGraph also focuses on type safety and built-in edge caching for performance. The community may be smaller than Apollo’s, but early adopters praise how it simplifies complex setups.
The number of major international companies incorporating GraphQL is growing - Shopify, Github, Medium, Docker, Twitter, Airbnb, and Paypal are just some of the mega-enterprises which have implemented GraphQL into their tech stack. Many of these tools, which began as niche products, have now seen wide adoption across the GraphQL Community. The speed of adoption of GraphQL in major enterprises and growing companies demonstrates that GraphQL is here to stay and will not be wiped out anytime soon.
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Firsthand experience with Hygraph and the features that make it your top choice for every project.
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