Hygraph Vs. Contentful

#Why Hygraph is a better alternative to Contentful?

Hygraph is not only a popular choice for simple use cases, but is also flexible for more innovative cases; especially end-user facing digital products requiring user-generated content. Contentful, on then other hand, is only good at serving typical legacy cases, for example, marketing pages.

This is because Contentful has major limitations when it comes to GraphQL performance. For instance, Contentful offers a limit of 8 KB for GraphQL requests as compared to 2024 KB by Hygraph. There is no GraphQL mutations API or GraphQL management API, no management API permissions and it offers rigid limitations for GraphQL complexity. Other limitations of Contentful include the lack of reusable components, no integrated API explorer and no saved queries.

Lastly for enterprises, unlike Hygraph, Contentful offers no option to choose datacenter location, no audit logs, and less efficient cache invalidation.

#Challenges you are likely to face with Contentful

You are likely to face these challenges when using Contenful:

• It will cause performance issues for large scale use cases because of rate limits. For instance, the GraphQL request size is 8 KB, which can’t be increased even on the enterprise plans.
• To save time and ensure consistency, you would likely be using the same set of fields across multiple content models. Contentful offers no functionality to create such reusable components across models.
• It’s hosted on Amazon’s AWS on the US East Coast. There are no other options to choose from and this is a challenge if you are looking to host in your own region.
• It does not allow you to connect to any third-party API.
• It does not offer a GraphQL mutations API. Changes to content would instead have to be made through the Content Management REST API.
• It offers no audit logs at the moment.
• It offers detailed permissions for content accessed through the UI. However, these permissions can’t be set based on field values (for eg., add a condition that a role can only access content where { "author": "John" }). Moreover, it lacks permission based tokens for content and management API.
• Lacks depth when it comes to certain content management capabilities. For instance, you can’t edit the default asset model, perform batch editing, hide fields from the UI, publish separately for each locale, etc.

On the other hand, Hygraph offers the capabilities to solve all of these challenges.

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#API and core features

Learn more about Hygraph's core features.

#Content modeling

#Editorial features and content management

Explore all of Hygraph's capabilities on our features page and docs.

#Digital asset management

#Community and resources

Explore more references on our GitHub profile, or view examples created with Hygraph and popular frameworks like Gatsby, NextJS, Svelte, Gridsome, and Vue, amongst others.

#Plans and pricing

Get started with a free forever developer plan or explore our other pricing options to accommodate your scaling needs.

#Security, compliance, and support

Note: We constantly monitor and update the information here as and when we're aware of any changes. For any inconsistencies or inaccuracies please get in touch to update the comparisons.