Hygraph Reviews & Product Details

GraphCMS from the ground up has been built with both the end-user and developers in mind. It offers extensible features which allow a developer to build a CMS that reflects their needs and requirements truly while also giving and user-friendly and customizable enough UI that non-technical users are comfortable opening it up and making changes. It has a host of well support integrations with popular frameworks such as React and a community Slack team that is well moderated and always open to giving a hand just fleshing out an idea or providing debugging help with integration or developer expereince. It's a pleasure to use, and It's hard to look back to more rigid solutions.

Sometimes it can feel like the UI is rather overwhelming with all the tabs and links and slide-out pages here and there. Sometimes I can struggle to search effectively using the search bar within the UI. Also, as a developer, It'd be amiss if I didn't ask for a dark mode :)

We are building an international Shopify store while also creating expansive and additional content for our content teams to add our own flair and meta data to products. The flexibility of relationship types in GraphCms has really allowed us to ensure we have a handle on what can be placed where while also providing our content team have the flexibility to build pages as desired using content modules we've built in-house.

When having a question or needing assistance, support is always very quick to respond and help. They really take their time (in a good way!) to help you through the problem. I've met with several of them and they all deliver top notch work!

Not really for us, but if you're not that tech savvy, it could be difficult to set the whole thing up yourself. You need a developer IMHO.

Different types of content are easily defined, created and fetched.

Easy to set up and get started with. Versatile content modeling with flexible model relations and on-fly changes without the need or worry about API, GraphQL obviously, and a cherry on top - included CDN with image transformation. Oh wait, there are two cherries on top, Netlify integration being the other.

The UI could use some TLC, seems like it was put together in a rush. I don't believe that developers would even notice this, but for content managers, it could take some time to get familiar with it. It's very flat, the whole screen looks like one big area but the actual entry form is just one column, with no tabs to group the content nor multiple columns. That single column is also hard to glance at and quickly find what you're looking for. Assets feature is also quite limited. It serves the purpose but it's very low-key.

GraphCMS solved my problem of having powerful, flexible, headless content management without hosting it myself. It also comes with CDN which is another functionality that I don't need to deal with.

The ease of use. It's pretty easy to navigate through and understand.

Assets management. There should be an easier way to correct items in assets including simply re-naming them.

It is allowing us to populate content quickly and easily. The faster we can get contnet on our site, the better and the more likely we are to obtain new clients.

good overview for different content pieces and the possibility of managing all authors and tags

sometimes hygraph is a bit slow with updated content

Managing our content pieces and evereything around

It is a very flexible platform that allows you to do a variety of things with the right internal resources.

As our site scaled the support and speed of things from Hygraph suffered.

We have a hyper-local business that Hygraph allows us to scale our website with custom pages at a rapid pace.

I really enjoy the convenient GraphQL interface. There is very little restriction on what you are able to store and I have experienced very minimal latency with the API. The API playground is also quite useful for visualizing queries.

The documentation is useful for day 1 and 2 of usage. More detailed documentation seems to lacking for more complicated queries. There doesn't seem to be a forum managed by GraphCMS to get answers from, nor is GraphCMS pervasive enough to have questions and answers on external sites like StackOverflow. For complex data, the relationship links between schema get quite nasty as well. Maybe the type system can be improved.

GraphCMS provides an easy non-technical interface for content people to curate and control information. It offloads the maintenance of such a database from the engineering team, opening up time for more important work.

Building content using models, fetching data using API. Robust and flexible. Easy asset management for content managers.

For en users like content managers a little technical system.

Supports our new online shop using headless development.

Most of the functionality is fairly clear.

Pushing changes to our website does take some time. It also lacks some functionality that we needed for our website, like contract creation.

We've automated many of our booking processes as well as set up accounts for our team.

The most important thing That I love about graphCMS is very fasttt and easy to use.

Hopefully you could add more things to it, To not be limited in this time

I wish you could add more language to it

It's the most user friendly cms platform i have experienced. visually less confusing than other similar platforms in a content implementation perspective.

Nested navigation is very confusing and annoying in general. Publishing vs Save logic gets confusing. Also has a few detectable bugs that influence the work flow.

easier to find existent components, and therefore to edit them. Assets library is also very intuitive and easy to use. Setting up components in BE is easier to understand and to brief to editors compared to other competitors.

Pre-built UI for building a GraphQL-enabled schema. Content editor for those who will input data. We don't need to create a backend.

Very limited if your project is growing. Pricing is abhorrent. You pay 300 for 50 models, then 500 more for another 25. And it's the same number of components.

It's a good concept, but they're super stingy with resources.

The UI is really nice and professional looking. I like that you can customise and organise the sidebar. Their API SDK uses TypeScript so it's essentially self documenting. Performance is pretty good once things are cached but awful when not. The SWR Cache customisation is nice. The ACL system is really thorough and very extensible. Localisation is good and the UI for it is good.

Pagination is limited to 100 when every other competitor has 250 to 1,000 and it's a little frustrating because it cannot be updated. The rate limits are also harsh (even when you're using your own private cluster they insist on some limits). I hit rate-limits when testing locally, by myself and hadn't even sent any traffic yet. They don't support proper image optimisation with a provide like Imgix or even Cloudflare image resizing. The free tier is very limiting which makes it hard for you to evaluate the product and they won't let you evaluate it properly without signing you up in a yearly contract if you need more models to evaluate it properly. Other Headless CMS's allow you to have more models and you only need Enterprise after you're sending enterprise level traffic. The sales team will essentially tell you that everything is possible, everything is fast, the dedicated cluster can handle unlimited traffic, the rate limits are non-existent - until you sign for a 1 year contract of 2,000/mo and suddenly reality hits after you send real traffic. If you want to extend it by adding users or locales you first have to speak to the sales team and wait for a contract amendment just to increase a number that most systems allow you to do in an admin panel. They'll try to upsell those users and locales to save money when it's $60/user instead of $10/user. When you have pay-as-you-go pricing models like AWS where you pay for exactly what you use, I hate when companies push you into large contracts up-front and make you pay before you can properly evaluate it. It's like going to a club, asking if it's busy inside and only after paying, realising that it's actually empty. In systems like Builder.io I'm able to make my project grow in small increments by increasing the required page views, bandwidth and users without having to sign a contract for a year before I need it. It makes the relationship feel sour and predatory. Unfortunately our previous CTO signed for it and then they wouldn't let us cancel the contract so we're paying for it and have since moved on.

Headless CMS with multi-tenancy and localisation for serving millions of users. The ACL system is great for allowing lots of users and picking exactly what they're able to see and edit.

I do like that it has a clean looking UI with the ability to control a significant amount of the customer experience

Hard to navigate UI, RTE needs a lot of work

Problem: provide a quality digital experience for government clients

The live graphql editing was a useful feature.

Our experience with graphcms has been uniformly negative.  When we deployed on the platform our production site would regularly be broken due to how what is now called 'legacy graphcms' worked internally. Specifically any edits to our content would cause some kind of cache invalidation in graphcms and our entire site would go down due to being unable to access content. Further, the way content editing works on the legacy platform was unusable by our marketing team. Specifically the way drafts worked caused content to disappear from our site b/c once an object was set to draft it would disappear from the published site.   We are extremely dissatisfied with our experience and are now faced with graphcms forcing us to do more work to migrate off of your legacy platform onto your new platform. We have 0 confidence that this work is useful or warranted based on our experience with the legacy system.

We intended to solve the classic content management problem but instead where faced with a terrible experience of a broken site we couldn't edit.

Hygraph is the most reliable CMS I've used. I've experimented with quite a few different options, but nothing came to the level of reliability & usability as Hygraph. Implementing it into our codebase is simple, the UI is no-frills & easy-to-manage, and most importantly, it has been reliable. Our team has increased the volume of content we're adding to the CMS and feel confident in housing it in Hygraph. We're excited to continue using it and see what else they come up with to improve the experience.

Some of the new kids on the block integrate easier with folks building website on top of the latest framworks (like Next.js). I'm sure this is something the Hygraph team is working on — I'd love to see easier integration of new schemas in a Next.js app.

- Non-technical stakeholder adding content to marketing site - Hosting content

Really enjoy the speed of api-responses on different geo's.

Can't think of anything. Even the team migration to new dashboard was easy.

Implemented on centralised content db and deliver across all platforms.

Both the Content and Management APIs are incredibly versatile and powerful. I was impressed that we could automate management tasks such as creating webhooks through an API.

Some features need a bit more love. Localisation is a bit janky, with weird treatment of the default language and not-so-intuitive mutations for updating data in localised fields. Overall it is manageable but could be better.

Having an automatically generated graphql API. Improved CMS experience for our content team. Automation via webhooks. A "source of truth" for our content metadata.

Very responsive to feedback when there's a bug or for feature requests. They don't implement everything we've asked them to, but they listen and make improvements to their product when the feature makes sense. Their webhook implementation is good, we use it to notify backend systems about content being updated, but we can opt out of receiving notifications when our automated systems performs the update. The user interface is intuitive enough that normal people can use it. The custom app integration is pretty nice. It allows us to do our own content quality checks and give instant feedback to the editor.

When you have a lot of data, the user interface can become slow. You'll have to manually update a default view of each model to reduce the amount of data you fetch when you're just trying to get the overview. If you have a lot of languages (10+) then the user interface can become a bit messy, but it's a lot nicer than many solutions out there.

Hygraph takes the burden of managing our content pieces, many of them very complex, without us having to update a single field. It enables us to move quickly in content creation, and update our content modeling without having to write many lines of code. We also don't have to worry about handling the database for the content (our data is easily in the hundreds of gigabytes, if not a few terabytes)

It's free to get started, and priced competitively to the market. Data schemas are easy to develop, and GraphQL is easy to work with. The static asset service is great - super easy to resize, crop, and change image formats for optimum cross-platform delivery.

Web interfaces are somewhat limited, although I know they are working to make improvements here.

It is our content management platform and allows us to have a single source of truth for all of our content and static asset needs.