A Hygraph alternative for a managed website with publishing included

Why people look for a Hygraph alternative in 2026

Hygraph is not a weak product being outgrown. It is a strong product bought for the wrong shape of problem. The platform was built around federation: the idea that a modern business has content scattered across a CMS, a commerce platform, a PIM, a CRM and a handful of internal services, and that the answer is a single GraphQL schema which queries all of them at once. For the companies that live that way, it is an elegant answer and there is very little competition for it.

The trouble is that most websites do not live that way. They have one source of truth, and the source of truth is the CMS. Buying a federation platform for a single back end means paying for the hardest problem in the category and then solving all the easy ones yourself.

Federation answers a question most sites never ask

Look at where remote sources actually sit on the price list. There are zero on Hobby. There is exactly one on Growth, the only paid self-serve plan. Up to ten sit behind an Enterprise contract with no published price. So the feature that defines the product is either absent, singular, or a sales conversation. A team with one content source spends a year on Growth without ever connecting a remote source, which means the entire reason to choose Hygraph over anything else was never switched on.

That is not a criticism of the engineering. Joining live external APIs into one typed schema with no duplication is genuinely difficult and Hygraph does it well. It is a criticism of the fit. Plumbing between five systems is worth a lot when you have five systems.

Two published prices, and the second one is $199

The self-serve ladder is unusually short. Hobby is free forever with no card, and it is a real free tier: three seats, 1,000 entries, 500,000 API calls, live preview and AI Assist. The next rung is Growth at $199 a month billed yearly, or $299 billed monthly. Nothing sits between them, and everything above Growth is quoted privately.

The jump matters because Hobby's ceilings arrive quickly. Assets count against the 1,000-entry limit, so a photo library is content. Hit a limit on Hobby and usage is blocked until the next billing period. Hit one on Growth and the overages bill automatically at the end of the cycle: $0.20 per 10,000 API operations and $0.20 per gigabyte of asset traffic. The docs also cap request payloads, returning a 413 above 10 KB of query on Hobby and 15 KB on Growth. None of this is hidden, but it does mean your monthly cost tracks your traffic rather than your plan.

Hygraph hands you content, not a website

Hygraph renders nothing. There are no themes, no page templates, no URLs, no RSS and no hosting, because publishing was never in scope. A working public site is Hygraph plus a frontend framework plus a deployment host plus a developer to build and maintain it. For a product team with frontend engineers that split is a feature. For a marketing team it is a project with no end date.

The gaps compound. There is no email anywhere in the product, so a newsletter means buying an ESP and wiring it up through webhooks. There is no cart or checkout, so selling means Shopify or commercetools alongside it. There is no SEO panel, because there are no pages to describe, so teams model their own SEO component and then implement every field by hand in the frontend. Scheduled publishing, which most editors assume is baseline, is Enterprise-only and missing from Growth entirely.

How Grigora compares

Grigora starts from the opposite assumption: that there is one source of truth, and that the useful thing to do with it is publish. The content model, the pages, the hosting, the newsletter and the store are the same product, so nothing has to be joined to anything. That is a smaller ambition than federation and it is the right size for most websites.

One back end, already attached to the pages

Describe the business in a sentence and Grigora generates a first-draft site, or start from one of website templates. The CMS underneath carries posts, categories, author profiles, directories and collections, and moderated comments with admin replies, with AI writing built into the editor. Hosting, CDN, SSL and backups are included, so there is no pipeline to deploy and nothing to patch.

Starter at $12/month billed annually includes a newsletter for 2,500 subscribers and a store with 0% platform commission on supported Stripe or Razorpay checkout. Business at $45/month raises the allowance to five sites, 250,000 AI credits and 25,000 subscribers. These three website tiers are less expensive than Hygraph Growth, but they are not equivalent products. Grigora also limits bandwidth, storage and other usage; compare the actual requirements and include payment-provider fees.

Where Hygraph still wins

Federation, modelling depth and portability, and it is not close on any of the three. If your content has to be queried alongside live rows from a commerce platform, a PIM or a CRM, Hygraph does that natively with up to ten remote sources and Grigora does not do it at all. If you need 500 models, 150 reusable components, taxonomies, variants, segments and permissions scoped to the individual field, stage and locale, Grigora's collections and directories are not in the same category. If you publish in eighty languages with per-locale permissions, SSO, audit logs and a 99.95% uptime SLA, that is an Enterprise headless platform and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Portability is the honest one. Being frontend-agnostic means a Hygraph customer can rebuild their entire website in a different framework and never touch the content. Grigora content exports, but there is no headless API, no code export and no self-hosting, so the renderer and the content stay together. That is the trade: you give up the ability to swap the front end, and you stop having to build one.