Frequently Asked Questions

Features & Capabilities

What makes Hygraph's API different from Contentful's?

Hygraph uses a GraphQL API, while Contentful relies on REST. GraphQL enables single-endpoint access for both read and write operations, allowing you to define exactly what data you want returned. This results in more efficient queries, less unnecessary data, and easier multi-platform support. Hygraph's API Explorer also provides auto-complete hints and documentation, streamlining the developer experience. Source

How does Hygraph simplify querying and filtering compared to Contentful?

With Hygraph's GraphQL API, you can structure queries to return only the data you need, and filtering is straightforward and flexible. The API Explorer helps you discover available filters and fields. In contrast, Contentful's REST API requires multiple endpoints and can become complex, especially for relational data. Source

Can Hygraph handle complex, nested content creation in a single API call?

Yes, Hygraph's GraphQL mutations allow you to create deeply nested and relational content in a single API call. This is much more efficient than REST, which requires multiple requests for each entry and relationship. Source

What integrations does Hygraph support?

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.

Does Hygraph provide technical documentation and API references?

Yes, Hygraph offers comprehensive technical documentation and API references, including guides for building and deploying projects. Access them at Hygraph Documentation and API Reference.

What are the key capabilities and benefits of Hygraph?

Hygraph provides a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and advanced API capabilities. Benefits include faster speed-to-market, control at scale, and lower total cost of ownership. Learn more at the Hygraph Features page.

Competition & Comparison

How does Hygraph compare to Contentful?

Hygraph stands out as a premier alternative to Contentful due to its superior API capabilities with GraphQL support and mutations, flexible content modeling, and advanced digital asset management. Unlike Contentful, Hygraph guarantees content is always up-to-date and delivered from the source of your choice thanks to plug-and-play Content Federation. Hygraph also offers higher developer productivity, type-safety, auto-generated documentation, and hosting in any world region. Source

Why should a customer choose Hygraph over alternatives?

Customers should choose Hygraph for its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and ability to create impactful digital experiences while reducing costs and improving efficiency. Hygraph empowers both technical and non-technical teams with an intuitive interface and robust API capabilities. Source

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 Hygraph Pricing page.

Use Cases & Benefits

Who can benefit from using 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, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or improve development velocity. Source

What business impact can customers expect from Hygraph?

Customers can expect significant time savings, streamlined workflows, 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

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

Can you share specific customer success stories using Hygraph?

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. More success stories are available on the Hygraph product page.

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, conflicting global team needs, clunky content creation), 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

How does Hygraph solve these pain points?

Hygraph provides an intuitive interface for non-technical users, modernizes legacy systems with its GraphQL-native architecture, ensures consistent branding via content federation, and streamlines workflows to reduce costs and accelerate speed-to-market. Technical solutions include simplified development, streamlined query management, and robust integration capabilities. Source

What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?

Key metrics include time saved on content updates, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more details, see the Hygraph blog on CMS KPIs.

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 SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. More details are available on the Hygraph Security Features page.

Support & Implementation

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. You can sign up for a free account and access documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Documentation | Case Study

What support and training does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and a community Slack channel. Contact Page

Customer Proof

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

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 and logos, visit the Hygraph Case Studies page.

Product Performance

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph emphasizes rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized performance helps reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. For more details, visit this page.

Ease of Use

What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?

Customers praise Hygraph for its intuitive interface and ease of setup. Feedback includes comments like 'super easy to set up and use,' and 'even non-technical users can start using it right away.' The user interface is described as logical and user-friendly. Source

Webinar Event: How to Avoid Personalization Tech Traps

Hygraph vs. Contentful - API Perspective

Contentful is a big player in the headless CMS market and will probably continue to be one for a while. Nonetheless, there are some pain points when working with Contentful, such as SDK issues and REST, and a growing number of developers are looking for alternatives. In this article, I want to compare working with Contentful's REST API and Hygraph's GraphQL API and show advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.
Fabian Beliza

Written by Fabian 

Dec 13, 2017
GraphCMS as a Contentful Alternative - GraphCMS Vs. Contentful API Perspective

Contentful is a big player in the headless CMS market and will probably continue to be one for a while. Nonetheless, there are some pain points when working with Contentful, such as SDK issues and REST, and a growing number of developers are looking for alternatives. In this article, I want to compare working with Contentful's REST API and Hygraph's GraphQL API and show advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.

#The API

The main difference between Hygraph and Contentful is the underlying API technology. With Hygraph we have GraphQL - a query language for APIs open-sourced by Facebook. With Contentful we have REST - a programming paradigm for distributed systems. While REST is the go-to standard, GraphQL is gaining a lot of traction and more and more developers want to get their hands on it. Both technologies allow talking to an API to retrieve and send data, which then can be consumed by any frontend. There are, however, critical differences. Let’s go through them!

Before we start, for the following examples we will be using a data model I prepared. It looks as follows:

DataModel

#Querying

REST - Contentful

Querying a REST API can be difficult at times, but if you are used to it, you'll probably know the gist. Let's take Contentful's Content Delivery API - one of the four main APIs. The others being Content Management, Content Preview, and Images API. Each API fulfills a different purpose – showing published entries, creating and deleting content, previewing drafts, and delivering images.

A typical GET request to the Content Delivery API would look something like this:

REST GET Request

The ID after spaces is the ID of my test space, and entries meaning to send a response with all entries in that space.

REST GET Response

The response looks something like this and gives you an overview of all your entries with their IDs, names and meta data.

GraphQL - Hygraph

A huge benefit with GraphQL is the single endpoint for performing both read and write operations. A GraphQL query to fetch all data in the CMS might look like this:

Simple GraphQL Query

We have a Content Model that includes League, Division, Team, Player, and Stadium. You can query all of these with this example. At first it seems like a lot more lines of code than a GET request with REST. What you are really doing, however, is defining a structure in which the API will return your data. This way you will know exactly what response the API will provide and there will be no unnecessary data you didn’t ask for.

What really makes the difference here is also the API Explorer of Hygraph. Once you start writing a query you will get hints about which data is available. You can also access the auto-complete hints by pressing CTRL+Space:

GraphiQL


The response will look exactly like the structure that you defined in the query:

GraphQL Response

If now you want to have less data in the query, for example excluding a player’s last name, you can simply leave it out of the query and it won't get returned. Alternatively, for more data, you simply add the necessary fields into your query. The data will now be returned in the response. This allows for true multi-platform queries, where data for the web client can look different than for a mobile client without extra work on the client-side.

#Adding content

REST

To add content through the Contentful API we would use the Content Management endpoint. The endpoint is now api.contentful.com/spaces/<SPACE_ID>/entries instead of cdn.contentful.com. To perform a write action a POST request is required. We also need to define a body with the data to be added:

Contentful Post Request

The response, if successful, will return the newly created entry with all the system fields and metadata. A major downside with REST is the missing possibility of adding nested or linked entries in one query. For every linked entry a new query is required and another one to create the link between them.

GraphQL

With GraphQL, adding entries is as simple as querying them. We simply need the keyword mutation instead of query. The endpoint is exactly the same as before. Here’s an example mutation for adding a new team:

GraphQL Mutation

In line 2 to 4, we define the mutation and what data we want to create. The following lines define the response format of the mutation:

GraphQL Mutation Response

As you can see, creating entries with GraphQL is straightforward and can be done very quickly. It gets even more interesting with nested queries: where you would need multiple POST requests with REST, you write a single GraphQL-Mutation. Don't worry if the query looks complicated at first sight, we will dig deeper into it:

GraphQL Mutation Team with Division

We are sending a createTeam mutation with a few parameters. The first one (line 3) is divisionId, which links the team we are creating to its respective division. Next, we set the teamName, which is a field from Team. After that we directly create a new stadium and also link it to the team. Lastly, we also create a new player and automatically create a link to the team. Instead of many REST requests, we did all of that with a single call to the API! All that is possible because all the Models are already connected through relations.

If you wanted to do the same with a REST API, you would need to send a request for every entry you wanted to create and also another request each to create appropriate links. It's definitely a lot more work and the code gets more confusing.

Contentful also offers nested queries or Links how they call them. You can link two entries from different content models with the sys type Link. To link a player to a team you would send a POST request with a body like this:

{
"sys": {
"type": "Entry",
"id": "<playerId>"
},
"fields": {
"teamName": {
"en-US": {
"sys": {
"type": "Link",
"linkType": "Entry",
"id": "<teamId>"
}
}
}
}
}

#Filtering

An essential tool when querying APIs is filtering. You don't always need every entry you have created, sometimes a selected piece is enough, e.g., the latest blog post or a specific team someone searched for.

REST

Contentful specifically offers a wide range of filters, from filtering for content types, ordering, limits to full-text searches.

As a specific example we now want to filter Players for their birthDate greater than 01-01-1990.

The URL might look something like this:

Contentful Filter

The response:

Contentful Filter Response

The URL is pretty straight-forward. Not the prettiest but does the job.

GraphQL

Now comes the really fun part of GraphQL. Combining the querying flexibility of GraphQL with filtering, you have complete control over what data and exactly in which format you receive., A quick word of warning: the filter logic doesn’t come built-in with GraphQL,it has to be implemented server-side. So the filtering in Hygraph can be different to other GraphQL services/servers.

A query for the same filter would look like this:

Hygraph Filter

Also a pretty straight forward query, and with the autocompletion in the API Explorer it's really easy to see which filters are available.

The response, of course, looks exactly like we requested it.

#Conclusion

Both CMS offer a good range of API tools and possibilities. Contentful does its job at maintaining a good REST API, but at the end of the day it's still REST. Doing simple requests can become very complex and tedious if you have a lot of data, especially if the data is relational. That's where GraphQL really shines: the developer experience is far more advanced and it's really easy and fun to dive deeper into the GraphQL matrix. Even more advanced queries, such as creating data with deeply nested elements, are pretty easy to understand and implement in your own system.

In the end, it is really up to you - do you prefer REST and like the ways you handle requests with it and access data across multiple endpoints? Go for Contentful and live a (maybe) happy life! If, on the other hand, you would like to experience simple querying, easy setup and, most importantly, an advanced developer experience? You should definitely take a look at GraphQL. If you also need a headless CMS, we at Hygraph would be happy to help!

First True Multi-Platform Headless CMS

While Contentful offers a wide range of SDK, it is still not easy to implement it in just about any digital platform of your choosing. An SDK might be missing or out of date.

Here's where Hygraph and GraphQL come into play: GraphQL is the first technology to allow true multi-platform use-cases. If your frontend can fetch JSON data you are good to go! Connected fridges, smartwatches, even cars and virtual reality headsets can access data with minimal effort and have it in exactly the format each of them needs. If this doesn't convince you, I don't know what else can!

Final words

If this article awakened your interest in Hygraph, feel free to message us with any questions you might have in our Slack Channel, Twitter, or simply via our On-Site-Chat!

Feel free to also give our product a go for yourself. We offer free trials and for hobby or test projects you can use our forever free Free plan. Learn more here.

Blog Author

Fabian Beliza

Fabian Beliza

Product Manager

Fabian is one of the Product Managers at Hygraph.

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