Hygraph is a GraphQL-native Headless CMS designed to help businesses manage content efficiently, unify data, and deliver exceptional digital experiences at scale. It enables composable architectures by decoupling content management from presentation, allowing data to be delivered to any frontend via APIs. Hygraph supports modular components, granular permissions, and content federation, making it suitable for complex, global operations. Learn more.
What are the key features of Hygraph?
Hygraph offers several key features:
GraphQL-native APIs for efficient data querying and management.
Modular components for flexible page building and reuse across content models.
Granular permissions for custom user roles and secure content workflows.
Content federation to unify data from multiple sources without duplication.
Intuitive editorial interface for both technical and non-technical users.
Yes, Hygraph is built around GraphQL APIs, including a Content API for querying and managing content, Mutations API for creating, updating, and deleting content, and an API Playground for testing queries and mutations. These APIs enable efficient integration with any frontend or third-party system. API Reference.
What integrations are available with Hygraph?
Hygraph integrates with a wide range of platforms, including Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. These integrations support hosting, eCommerce, digital asset management, localization, personalization, AI, and more. See the full list.
Performance & Business Impact
What measurable performance improvements can Hygraph deliver?
Hygraph has delivered significant performance improvements for customers:
Komax Group achieved a 3x faster time-to-market and 70% faster page loading time after migrating to Hygraph. Their largest contentful paint improved from 5.0s to 0.8s. (Source)
Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization. (Source)
Stobag increased online revenue share from 15% to 70%. (Source)
Samsung scaled globally and improved customer engagement by 15%. (Source)
These metrics demonstrate Hygraph's ability to accelerate project delivery, improve user experience, and drive business growth.
What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?
Hygraph is trusted by leading brands across industries, including Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, JDE, Dr. Oetker, Ashley Furniture, Lindex, Hairhouse, Komax, Shure, Stobag, Burrow, G2I, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, Codecentric, Voi, Clayton Homes, Samsung, Telenor, and Statistics Finland. See more.
Ease of Use & Implementation
How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?
Hygraph is designed to be super easy to set up and use, even for non-technical users. Customers can start building immediately by signing up for a free account. The intuitive interface and customizable UI make onboarding straightforward. Comprehensive documentation, onboarding guides, training resources, and dedicated support are available to help users get started quickly. Documentation.
How long does it take to implement Hygraph?
Implementation time varies by project complexity. For example, Top Villas launched a new project within 2 months from the initial touchpoint, demonstrating Hygraph's efficiency. The platform's intuitive setup and onboarding resources help accelerate adoption. Read more.
What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?
Customers describe Hygraph as very good and intuitive, with an interface that is easy for both technical and non-technical users. It is praised for being super easy to set up and use, allowing non-technical users to start right away. The customizable UI supports content quality checks and instant feedback for editors. Some users note that the interface can become complex with many languages, but overall, Hygraph is highly regarded for its ease of use. Source.
Support & Training
What customer service and support options are available?
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone for troubleshooting, maintenance, and upgrades. Enterprise customers receive dedicated Customer Success Managers, regular health checks, and launch support. Comprehensive documentation and a Community Slack Channel are available for additional help. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) ensure critical issues are resolved within less than an hour. Contact page.
What training and technical support is available to help customers get started?
Hygraph offers comprehensive documentation, onboarding services, video tutorials, webinars, and expert-led sessions. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and ongoing support from Customer Success Managers. The Community Slack Channel and 24/7 support are available for troubleshooting and knowledge sharing. Documentation.
Security & Compliance
What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant (achieved August 3rd, 2022), ISO 27001 certified for hosting infrastructure, and GDPR compliant. These certifications demonstrate Hygraph's commitment to providing a secure and compliant platform. Security Features.
How does Hygraph ensure data security and compliance?
Hygraph provides SSO integrations, audit logs (90-day retention), sandbox environments, data encryption at rest and in transit, and custom roles and permissions. It supports enterprise-grade compliance for industries like travel, eCommerce, and fashion, and adheres to GDPR and EU-US Privacy Shield standards. Security Features.
Pain Points & Solutions
What problems does Hygraph solve for businesses?
Hygraph addresses operational, financial, and technical challenges:
Reduces dependency on developers for content updates
Modernizes outdated tech stacks
Enables global team collaboration and content federation
What pain points do customers commonly express before switching to Hygraph?
Common pain points include:
Slow workflows due to developer dependency
Outdated or legacy tech stacks
Conflicting needs from global teams
Clunky user experience for content management
High operational and maintenance costs
Limited integration capabilities
Scaling challenges
Boilerplate code and complex queries
Cache issues and OpenID integration difficulties
Hygraph addresses these with its modern, scalable, and intuitive platform. Source.
Technical Documentation & Requirements
Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation. Topics include developer guides, content workflows, roles and permissions, webhooks, and more. Additional workflow documentation is available here.
How does Hygraph handle maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting?
Hygraph provides 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting via chat, email, and phone. Comprehensive documentation and a Community Slack Channel are available for guidance. Enterprise customers receive dedicated Customer Success Managers and regular health checks. SLAs ensure critical issues are resolved quickly. Contact page.
Competition & Differentiation
Why should a customer choose Hygraph over alternatives?
Hygraph stands out for its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, intuitive editorial interface, dedicated support, lower total cost of ownership, and proven success with global brands. Unlike many competitors using REST APIs, Hygraph offers more efficient data querying and management. Case studies from Samsung and Dr. Oetker demonstrate faster time-to-market and improved engagement. Product page.
Komax Group breaks down monolithic setup with Hygraph and builds website 3 times faster
70%
Faster page loading time
3x
Faster to iterate on
new website elements
0.8s
Largest contentful paint
The Komax Group story
With its sales and service networks worldwide, Komax is steadily growing and making strategic acquisitions to improve its offerings to customers.
With Komax Group's business growing, the monolithic infrastructure in place has presented particular challenges for providing a modern digital experience to customers, such as slow time-to-market, inefficient content workflow, and scalability issues. Therefore, Komax Group embarked on the replatforming journey with its digital agency oddEVEN.
As part of the project, Komax Group aimed to develop a new website with a customer portal, in which a CMS would play a central role. Having outgrown its legacy CMS, Komax Group now uses Hygraph to build a modernized architecture and deliver unified customer experiences.
Since the product will evolve quite fast, we think Hygraph's component approach will help us in the right direction.
Stefan MalärManaging Partner at oddEVEN
Project challenges
A deeply coupled system that couldn’t cut it anymore
The legacy architecture of Komax Group was based on a monolithic, on-premise system consisting of Sitecore and .Net applications, which were tightly coupled and slowed development. As a result, whenever something needed to be changed, it would always impact the entire system, and even adding a minor feature was time-consuming. Furthermore, the CMS did not have an optimal cost/benefit ratio.
Poor editorial experience that hinders content velocity
Komax Group had many editorial hiccups using the previous CMS. The Marketing team found the user interface not intuitive enough to locate files, and it wasn't easy to onboard new editors. Formatting was not always consistent when text was copied, requiring HTML code to be edited. As a result, Komax Group had a limited number of team members proficient in using the CMS. Consequently, even basic tasks like video uploads had to be outsourced to their digital agency. In addition, the CMS was not connected to other systems, so a straightforward update in the PIM system had to be copied manually to the CMS.
When the Marketing team wanted to upload a video, they had to send it to the agency. They would upload it to a platform and send it back with an ID for insertion into the previous CMS. It was very time-consuming.
Natalie Wieser, Digital Services Product Owner at Komax
Project objectives:
Break down monolithic architecture with headless solutions
Komax Group understood the need to take a composable approach with their new architecture, which allowed them to optimize the customer experience through best-of-breed services. It makes more sense for different products to work with each other cohesively than being tightly coupled. Komax Group also had to consider all the dependencies, systems, and departments involved – essentially, they should have an integration layer to connect data to the frontends via APIs. So, instead of consolidating a stack where each system has its own siloed setup, Komax Group decided to adopt a modular and headless architecture that would free them up and allow different parts of the system to intercommunicate via APIs.
Deliver future-ready customer digital experience
As an industry leader, Komax Group must think long-term. The team is now challenged to extend its customer offerings in innovative ways, such as providing more self-services, IoT services, and fully automated services. Komax Group sets itself apart from the competition by taking the first step with an improved customer experience platform.
Hygraph’s solution:
Having outlined the architecture for the POC, it became clear that Komax Group will use a headless approach, where data will be retrieved from the CMS, PIM, and CIAM (Customer Identity Access Management) and delivered to the frontend via APIs.
In looking for a headless CMS, it's crucial that it is well-integrated with the system stack. Hygraph's GraphQL-native APIs and flexible components approach set it apart from the shortlisted vendors. Komax Group chose Hygraph, trusting that Hygraph's team of experts would walk alongside them throughout the project and help them iterate solutions quickly.
Komax Group primarily benefited from the following features of Hygraph for this project:
Stellar website performance with GraphQL APIs
GraphQL is Komax Group's API of choice across its stack for its flexibility to support different consumers, minimize over-fetching of data, and it can be easily evolved and is self-documenting. There is also a lot of related data for the Komax Group digital service, which is easy to query with GraphQL. It was vital that the CMS had performant and comprehensive GraphQL APIs to integrate into the system easily.
Being a GraphQL-native CMS, Hygraph can adequately support the API requirements for Komax’s project. Hygraph provides powerful GraphQL APIs and supports them with one of the industry's most advanced high-performance endpoints. Hygraph serves all content via GraphQL APIs, with no frontend, tooling, or platform restrictions, ensuring that data remains accurate and manual entry mistakes are eliminated.
A general GraphQL approach also offers more possibilities to connect the CMS with other third-party applications later. In addition, Hygraph's unique Content Federation approach offers future possibilities for federating content from external sources.
Essentially, this means that developers can optimize performance by delivering content via APIs, which reduces page load times and provides a faster, more responsive user experience.
Agile editing with modular components
Komax Group is not only a mechanical engineering company but also offers a wide range of services for wire processing. Therefore, Hygraph's modular components are crucial in enabling Komax Group to build pages to present offerings along the value chain flexibly.
When setting up the schema, Komax Group defined a series of components that can be reused across multiple content models, such as banners, buttons, and download cards, to name a few. Then, they used the modular component field inside Hygraph to host those components. This has enabled Komax Group to build their pages in a modular way, where they can easily add, remove, and compose a fine selection of components in a content entry and reuse them on other content models as they want.
This means editors can experiment with content based on business insights without having to involve developers. Since a modular component model offers no limitations on how many components can be added, developers can now easily modify and extend the model as per editors' request.
Easy onboarding with an efficient workflow
Hygraph’s clean UI, granular user roles, and permissions made the editorial process easier for content editors. Komax Group created several custom role types, each with unique permissions to handle content and projects in Hygraph. Any CMS user can now add, fix, and change content without involving developers or worrying about changing data the wrong way.
In addition to the product feature, Komax Group appreciated the Hygraph team's efficiency in responding to their requests and guiding them through using the product. Behind a powerful stack, it is a professional team that makes Hygraph clients happy with the product.
The tech stack
To break down the overall monolithic architecture, Komax Group started by replacing some on-premise solutions with cloud solutions as a first step. Later, with the adoption of Hygraph and many other headless solutions, Komax Group launched an entirely new architecture for their website last year. Currently, they are building a login area on the website that will be the new customer portal. They plan to incorporate all digital services step by step.
Previously, the Komax Group website and its customer portal had separate frontends built on top of Sitecore. With the new architecture, Komax Group uses the Nuxt 3 app on the frontend that connects to several APIs and fetches data accordingly. In addition to Hygraph, it also connects to a GraphQL integration layer to get information like PIM data. Instead of tightly integrating frontend components from various systems, Komax Group now has a decoupled frontend that consumes APIs.
The result and key benefits
By using Hygraph, Komax Group is able to create a website with an extendable system and develop new use cases easily. Now, the headless setup is flexible enough that Komax Group developers can integrate not-before-known requirements without changing many things, and content editors can spin up new pages quickly with modular page components.
Komax Group is now at the beginning of their new portal modernization process. Their pilot solution consists of several digital services, which they will step by step integrate into the customer portal and build up new services. Ultimately, Komax Group will offer customers a combination of digital services and value-added services.
When it comes to measurable results:
The elements on the website can now be added much faster than ever before to meet evolving customer expectations, which is a 2 or 3 times speed acceleration over the past.
Overall loading times have been drastically reduced. Depending on the locale, the reduction can reach 70%.
There is an overall uplift for all core web vital metrics, including the largest contentful paint, which decreased from 5.0s to 0.8s.
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