Frequently Asked Questions

Product Information & Features

What is Hygraph and how is it used in content-intensive applications?

Hygraph is a headless CMS and content platform designed to manage and deliver content-intensive applications at scale. It supports content federation, numerous integrations, and highly-optimized content delivery through its GraphQL API. Hygraph enables you to centralize, structure, and deliver content from multiple sources to various frontends, such as websites and mobile apps. Source

What are the key features of Hygraph?

Key features of Hygraph include:

Source

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API that enables efficient content fetching, management, and delivery across all platforms. Learn more

What integrations does Hygraph support?

Hygraph supports a wide range of integrations, including:

Full list of integrations

Is technical documentation available for Hygraph?

Yes, Hygraph provides comprehensive technical documentation covering all aspects of building and deploying projects. Access Hygraph Documentation

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. 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

What types of applications is Hygraph best suited for?

Hygraph excels in managing content-intensive applications, including:

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. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. Source

Can you share specific case studies or success stories of customers using Hygraph?

Yes, Hygraph has several notable success stories:

Explore more customer stories.

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

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph is trusted by leading brands including Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. See more

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve for content-intensive applications?

Hygraph addresses operational, financial, and technical pain points:

Source

How does Hygraph differentiate itself in solving these pain points?

Hygraph stands out by offering a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, and scalability. It empowers non-technical users, modernizes outdated systems, ensures consistent branding, streamlines workflows, and supports scalability for business growth. These solutions are tailored for developers, content creators, and business stakeholders. Source

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

Key metrics include:

More on CMS KPIs

Do the pain points solved by Hygraph differ by persona?

Yes, Hygraph tailors its solutions to different personas:

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 full details, visit the Hygraph pricing page.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure enterprise-grade security and data protection. Learn more

What security features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. Security Features

Support & Implementation

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for quick onboarding, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and use resources like documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Documentation

What customer 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 have access to documentation, video tutorials, and a community Slack channel. Contact Hygraph

What training and technical support does Hygraph provide for onboarding?

Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. Contact Hygraph

How does Hygraph handle maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, while all users can access documentation and the community Slack channel. Contact Hygraph

Performance & Optimization

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph ensures rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized content delivery reduces bounce rates and increases conversions. Learn more

Customer Experience & Ease of Use

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

Customers praise Hygraph for its intuitive interface and ease of use, noting 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

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Delivering in-app content for content-intensive applications

In this article, you’ll learn how a headless CMS platform like Hygraph can help you manage all kinds of content-intensive apps at scale.
Arek Nawo

Written by Arek 

Mar 23, 2023
Delivering in-app content for content-intensive applications

Many applications nowadays are very content-intensive, generating vast amounts of content on a daily basis. For those applications, content isn’t only meant to fill their website or serve a marketing purpose—it’s at the very core of their functionality. Whether it’s text, video, or product information, delivering content quickly and reliably is of the utmost importance.

In this article, you’ll learn how a headless CMS platform like Hygraph can help you manage all kinds of content-intensive apps at scale.

#What are the characteristics of content-intensive applications?

Content-intensive applications differentiate themselves with far more than just heavy reliance on the content itself. First off, their entire architecture has to be optimized for efficient content management and fast content delivery. Consider the sample architecture diagram below:

Sample architecture of a content-intensive application

In most cases, content-heavy applications utilize a number of data sources and services. This allows them not only to make use of different technologies and balance server load but also to process content and access additional features provided by third-party services like content optimization or analysis.

In the end, all the data is usually collected, managed, and delivered from a singular, central system—a role generally filled by CMSs. In the process of the content federation, a CMS pulls data from many different sources and services, to then give the user access to proper content management tools to establish content relations and apply final processing and optimizations. This 2U case study is a great example of such a process in action.

After all that is done, the content is finally ready to be delivered to all kinds of frontend applications. It’s important to note that many content-intensive applications have at least two frontends to deliver content to (such as a website and a mobile app). Combining this with vast amounts of content at play, the entire delivery process has to be highly optimized and reliable.

#Requirements of a content-intensive application

With such sample architecture in mind, it’s possible to determine the critical requirements of pretty much all content-intensive applications.

Optimized content delivery

To facilitate multiple frontends, content delivery needs to be fully optimized. First off, it has to have high throughput and support for concurrency to deliver content to all necessary channels reliably and equally fast. On top of that, low latency is another important factor, especially for frequently updated content.

Ability to handle vast amounts of content

The thing with content-intensive applications is that, with the growth of the application, the amount of data grows exponentially. Such growth needs to be sustained over long periods, which requires a proper, scalable architecture to be set in place.

Integration with third-party services

Finally, content-intensive applications are especially dependent on integrations with third-party services as it’s necessary to properly manage and process vast amounts of content. Whether that’s for data storage, processing, optimization, or analytics, the application has to integrate and manage the data flow across all the necessary services.

#What is Hygraph and how is it used?

As a content platform and headless CMS, Hygraph is a perfect fit for the central part of any content-intensive application. Thanks to support for content federation, numerous integrations, and scalable, highly-optimized content delivery through its GraphQL API, it provides everything you need to manage and scale all kinds of content-heavy applications.

Structured content applications

With its GraphQL-based API and schema-structured content modeling, Hygraph is a great choice any time content structurization is required. Utilizing content federation to first pull, then process and structure your data, to finally deliver it through its convenient GraphQL API is one of the best possible experiences you can have when working with structured content coming from multiple sources.

Marketing and SEO-optimized websites

Due to its user-friendly content studio, support for all kinds of metadata, and a strong SEO foundation, Hygraph works really well for any content-heavy applications, including marketing websites and blogs. On top of that, built-in workflows, collaboration support, and all the available tooling, like its assets manager and rich text editor, make producing and publishing new content straightforward.

Interactive application content

Building on its support for all kinds of structured content, SEO optimization, and GraphQL API, Hygraph is great base for all kinds of application content. It allows you to break away from the limitations of traditional CMSs and deliver all kinds of content to all kinds of endpoints, just the way you and your users want it.

#Why is Hygraph suited for content-intensive applications?

Now you know the characteristics of content-intensive applications. On top of that, you have a good understanding of their architecture and how Hygraph can fit into it. To go a bit deeper, here are a few of Hygraph’s features to help you better understand its value for content-heavy applications.

Easy collection of data from different sources

As mentioned previously, content federation is a big part of most content-intensive applications. With Hygraph, it’s easily achievable thanks to the Remote Sources functionality, which allows you to connect to external REST and GraphQL APIs to pull all necessary content. This can be a game changer when you need to unify and access data from multiple sources.

Centralization of data in one location

Collecting data through content federation has another benefit in the form of centralizing data in one location. This results in easier content management, thus speeding up content creation, optimization, and future updates. This way, Hygraph can serve as a single source of data for all your frontend applications, so you don’t have to worry about the setup of your infrastructure.

Reusable content via components

Creating content is even easier when utilizing Hygraph’s Components—pre-defined, reusable fieldsets. With the flexibility provided by Components, you can move away from rigid structures and create new content even faster. In large collections of structured content, Components allow you to be sure that every piece of content contains all the data it needs, while making the entire process of adding and managing that data much easier.

Unlimited API operations and traffic

Being at the center of your content-intensive application, Hygraph can easily handle all your traffic with great performance. You can use its powerful GraphQL API to easily scale and manage all your frontend platforms, accessing the entirety of the data stored as needed. This translates to less time spent on scaling your application and more focus on creating and managing content.

Compatibility with all platforms

Combined with the headless CMS approach, Hygraph’s powerful GraphQL API can serve all kinds of platforms—mobile, desktop, web—you name it! It enables you to create and support new types of user experiences. Leviathan’s case study is a good example of that. They’ve embraced Hygraph and its GraphQL API to deliver interactive content to digital signages. That’s a unique case of a content-intensive application.

Unification of data models

Hygraph’s support for structured content works wonders when you need to pull data from different sources. It enables you to unify all the data models and access all the necessary information through its clean GraphQL API. You no longer have to continuously keep track of your entire infrastructure and know how and from where to access all your data. Simply connect a data source to Hygraph once and you’re good to go.

Practical data segmentation

The data you need for a website might not be the same as required by, for example, a smart TV app. Combining Hygraph’s GraphQL API with its support for different kinds of content and metadata makes for a perfect tool for data segmentation. This way you can query just the data you need on the platform you need it for.

Guaranteed availability and scale

Hygraph scales with your application and content base as you grow. Its guaranteed availability, reliability, and scalability are not only reassuring but also necessary for enterprise-grade use. Thanks to that, companies like Samsung can build their platforms utilizing all features of Hygraph, while being sure it can handle the usage and scale appropriately when needed.

Certified and compliant

As you scale globally, staying compliant with standards like GDPR isn’t easy. Thankfully, Hygraph handles it all for you, including compliance and security.

#Conclusion

This article provided an overview of the characteristics and features of content-intensive applications. Maintaining and scaling such applications isn’t easy, and that’s why headless CMSs like Hygraph are so beneficial. With things like optimization, API access, and content federation taken care of, you can focus on what really matters: your content.

Blog Author

Arek Nawo

Arek Nawo

Arek Nawo is a web developer, freelancer, and creator of CodeWrite: https://codewrite.io.

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