Hygraph review
Best GraphQL-native option
Hygraph was built around GraphQL rather than having it added later, and the difference shows in the schema design, the filtering and the way relations resolve. If your team already thinks in GraphQL, this is the least friction of anything here.
Its distinguishing feature is content federation: remote REST and GraphQL sources can be stitched into the Hygraph schema so a single query returns CMS content alongside product data, inventory or anything else you own. That turns the CMS into a composition layer instead of just a content store.
Who Hygraph is for
Product and commerce teams whose pages need to combine editorial content with data from systems the CMS does not own. Also a good fit for any team standardising on GraphQL across services.
Less suitable if you want REST, or if the content model is simple enough that federation is solving a problem you do not have.
Strengths and limits
What it does well
- Genuinely GraphQL-native, so filtering, nesting and relation traversal behave the way a GraphQL developer expects rather than approximating it.
- Content federation lets one query span the CMS and remote sources, which removes a whole orchestration layer from the front end.
- The Hobby tier is real: 3 seats, 1,000 entries and 500,000 API calls a month, free forever.
- Overage is metered and cheap at $0.20 per million API operations rather than forcing a tier upgrade.
Where it falls short
- No REST API. If part of your stack cannot speak GraphQL, that is a hard constraint rather than an inconvenience.
- The jump from free to $199 a month is steep for a small team, and the middle of the market is thin.
- Uncached rate limits are low on the lower tiers: 5 requests a second on Hobby and 25 on Growth, so uncached traffic patterns need thought.
- Entry limits bite early at 1,000 on Hobby and 10,000 on Growth, which is restrictive for content-heavy sites.
Hygraph pricing
Hobby is free forever with 3 seats, 1,000 entries, 500,000 API calls, 2 locales, 100GB of asset traffic and a 5 requests-per-second uncached rate limit.
Growth is $199 a month for 10 seats, 10,000 entries, 1,000,000 API calls, 3 locales, 500GB of asset traffic and 25 requests a second. Overage is $0.20 per 1,000,000 API operations and $0.20 per GB of asset traffic. Enterprise is quote-only and scales to 200 seats, 1,000,000+ entries, 50,000,000+ API calls, 80 locales and 500 requests a second. New Hobby projects can take a free 30-day Enterprise trial.
Verdict
The specialist pick, and a strong one in its lane. If the job is composing editorial content with data from other systems into one query, federation makes Hygraph meaningfully simpler than the alternatives rather than marginally different.
If you do not need that, you are paying $199 a month for a GraphQL API that Sanity and Contentful also offer. The entry limits are the thing to size before committing.
Hygraph FAQ
Does Hygraph have a REST API?
No. Hygraph is GraphQL-only by design. If something in your stack cannot speak GraphQL, that is a blocker rather than a workaround, and DatoCMS or Contentful would be the closer comparison.What is content federation?
It lets you register remote REST or GraphQL sources into the Hygraph schema so one query returns CMS content and external data together. In practice it removes the orchestration layer that would otherwise sit in your front end stitching two or three APIs into one page.How much does Hygraph cost?
Hobby is free with 3 seats, 1,000 entries and 500,000 API calls a month. Growth is $199 a month for 10 seats, 10,000 entries and 1,000,000 calls, with overage at $0.20 per million operations. Enterprise is quote-only.
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This is an independent review. We have no affiliate relationship with Hygraph, earn nothing if you sign up, and no vendor pays for placement in the directory. Prices were read from the vendor's own pages in August 2026 and change without notice.