Frequently Asked Questions

Hygraph enables developers to build powerful GraphQL content APIs in a matter of minutes, while it gives content creators all the tools they need to manage their content. Hygraph is a headless content management system, so the hosted content APIs can be easily consumed by websites, apps or any other platform.

A Headless CMS is a content repository that delivers content to any platform or device via API. The intended consumption of this content is by devices in a raw structured format, such as HTML or JSON, and isn't meant for human consumption until rendered on the end device.

Learn more about what a Headless CMS is on the Hygraph Academy.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need, and nothing more, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time, and enables powerful developer tools.

GraphQL supports reading, writing (mutating), and subscribing to changes to data (realtime updates – most commonly implemented using WebHooks). GraphQL servers are available for multiple languages, including Haskell, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, C#, Scala, Go, Erlang, PHP, and R.

Whereas REST typically requires multiple round-trips for simple requests and the content is distributed across several API endpoints, GraphQL needs only one round-trip for complex requests, and projects have one single endpoint to version, secure, and maintain.

Further downsides of REST include Content structure change requests that increase cross-department effort; Frequent delivery of unnecessary data; Weakly-typed nature; Requirement for manual API documentation.

Find out more about GraphQL and the difference to REST on our academy page.

One Endpoint to Rule Them All

With GraphQL as a query language, it is up to your client application to specify the shape of the data it requires from the server. A GraphQL query returns exactly what a client asks for and no more. There is just one endpoint on the server that is capable of serving all the data that is requested.

Declarative and Strongly-Typed

The GraphQL type system helps to ensure that your queries are valid at the time of development. This saves you from the frustration of invalid queries and boosts your productivity.

Minimum Payload

Since your application receives only the data it requested, the payload is limited to the minimum. This is especially important in mobile or low bandwidth scenarios. On top of that, communication overhead is reduced: querying a complex content graph, GraphQL will be able to deliver all data in just one round trip.

Generated API Documentation

Writing and maintaining API documentation can be cumbersome. With GraphQL, you don't have to worry about documentation at all. Through introspection, all of your API documentation will be generated automatically.

All the details about recent product releases can be found here.

All the details about our upcoming product releases can be found in our public Roadmap.

If you're new to Hygraph, we'd recommend starting with this video that walks you through the Hygraph interface, and highlights how content is delivered via our API.

If you're looking to start working on a project, our documentation gives you a complete overview of building a project from start to production.

Alternatively, you can explore our examples to see how Hygraph works with common tools and frameworks like NextJS, Gatsby, Nuxt, Svelte, and React, amongst others.

Content can be imported via the API of your project. Hygraph supports read and write operations. With a simple script you can push your content in pre-defined schemas. Here is an example start-to-finish project demonstrating the process.

We are also constantly working on simplifying the process to migrate from other sources via API, CSV, and other popular formats. If you have special requirements, get in touch with us for assistance on migrating to Hygraph.

Asset Traffic represents the amount of assets (e.g. images, videos, pdf, etc.) downloaded by viewers. This is the bandwidth consumed.

All paid self-service plans come with a limitation of 0.5 TB of Asset traffic and 1.000.000 API operations per month satisfying the needs of most organizations. Additional resources can be added on demand.

Enterprise plans come with larger custom bandwidth and operation limits

See our self-service plans here or contact our sales team to discuss enterprise pricing plans.

Yes! Find out more about the agencies and partners that are successfully employing Hygraph, our partner program, and partner benefits on our Partner page.

Yes, you can use webhooks for reacting to calls from other applications. It doesn’t matter where the calls are coming from.

Yes, it is possible with webhooks. You can find out more on the Hygraph webhooks documentation.

Your content is live (if published) and query-able almost instantly, within < 1sec.

In the case of a Headless CMS, best practices are to add your Tracking IDs in the front-end of your application or website. Most commonly this is achieved by adding a single tracking container ID for a tag management platform (like Google Tag Manager), and handling scripts for Analytics (and other solutions) from there.

Hygraph Content Views and View Groups offer a folder-like structure for your content. Persistent Content Views allow a persistent view of content with specific features for which a filter is pre-applied.

With our webhooks and write-operations (mutations) you are able to connect any 3rd-party services.

There is a built-in preview for each content item created. Entries that are set to “Draft” or “Not published” in your content editing window can first be pushed to a test-version of your application in the front-end for preview before they get published on the production version of the application. More about content previews and preview URLs can be found in our documentation.

Yes, this is defined either in your app schema, or via filters.

Yes, this is defined either in your app schema, or via filters.

Currently, the content authoring interface is only in English.

The Management API has auto-generated documentation via the API Explorer.

The Management API allows you to programmatically do the following operations within and across projects:

• Create, delete and update content models, enumerations, fields, content views
• Invite users
• Deploy a schema
• Add and revoke permissions to a role
• Create, update, delete a project
• Clone and sync a stage
• Import and export content
• Create authorisation tokens
• Create, update, delete a webhook

Use cases include migrating your schema and content from a legacy CMS into Hygraph, using project-templates (write-once-use-multiple-times), fixing bugs in several projects.

Hygraph enables content teams to perform a wide range of on-the-fly image transformation actions including:

• Resizing and aligning
• Cropping
• Rotating
• Flipping
• Flopping
• Adding a watermark
• Facial Detection
• Pixelating and Blurring faces
• Filetype conversion
• Compression
• Quality change
• Chain transformations

Learn more about Assets in Hygraph on our docs.

Hygraph only counts the size of the resized image.

Hygraph projects are physically hosted on state-of-the-art Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

Projects on Dedicated Infrastructure, an Enterprise service, can be hosted in every available region in the AWS global network. Contact us for more information.

Projects on Shared Infrastructures give you 9 options on which data centers to host your content in:

• Australia (Sydney)
• Brazil (São Paulo)
• Canada (Montreal)
• Germany (Frankfurt)
• India (Mumbai)
• Japan (Tokyo)
• US East (North Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• United Kingdom (London)

When creating a new project, you can select which of these locations best suits your project.

Note: Regardless of where you host your content (select an option closest to you), all content and assets will be cached and served from our globally distributed edge network.

Yes, Hygraph is hosted on a scalable state-of-the-art server architecture hosted by Amazon Web Services and based on PostgresQL.

Yes, this is possible with project cloning. We support hosting in nine regions out of the box.

• Australia (Sydney)
• Brazil (São Paulo)
• Canada (Montreal)
• Germany (Frankfurt)
• India (Mumbai)
• Japan (Tokyo)
• US East (North Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• United Kingdom (London)

More regions are available with dedicated infrastructure upon request. To explore our dedicated infrastructure options, get in touch.

Depending on your plan, there are no limits on storage or project entries and records.

This depends on your location, the location of your users, and the complexity of your GraphQL queries. We aim for a latency of a maximum of 70-100 ms for requests.

The assets are delivered via our provider Filestack who use Fastly as their content distribution network (CDN).

Your application files are usually in your control. We provide the API for the content but not a full-stack solution to manage your frontend deployments. A lot of our users use a myriad of services like Netlify, Vercel, Azure, AWS, or Heroku to host and deploy.

We have different testing strategies to avoid regressions. It is a mix of unit testing and integration tests. We also periodically run automated tests against canary deployments before releasing new features, to ensure we don’t introduce regressions.

Regarding monitoring, we use LSTIO (Prometheus) for monitoring low-level metrics (like resources as CPU, memory, networks throughput, etc), as well as apollo engine for our management server, which is used by the web app (e.g. to create a project, create a model, etc).

Our new Instant Backup and Recovery (available as an add-on in the Enterprise plan) helps you get your applications back to a working state by allowing you to restore to an earlier version of your main environment instantly with one click.

The content databases support point-in-time recovery (PiTR). Point-in-time recovery allows restoring a database to the state it was at any point in time.

We provide automatic daily backup of a project's master environment, with a 7-day retention. Backups contain content, assets & schema.

Nightly (or more frequent) copies of your content can be created using the Hygraph Content API.

Yes, they allow you to monitor schema and content changes.

With custom roles you have the ability to define customized permissions for collaborators.

Projects on Dedicated Infrastructure, an Enterprise service, can be hosted in every available region in the AWS global network. Contact us for more information.

Projects on Shared Infrastructures give you 9 options on which data centers to host your content in:

• Australia (Sydney)
• Brazil (São Paulo)
• Canada (Montreal)
• Germany (Frankfurt)
• India (Mumbai)
• Japan (Tokyo)
• US East (North Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• United Kingdom (London)

When creating a new project, you can select which of these locations best suits your project.

Yes. Hygraph offers enterprise-grade service level agreements. We offer service uptime guarantees of up to 99.95%. Our support response time guarantees can be for as low as 30 minutes for critical issues. Reach out to our sales team for details.

For improved team collaboration and a more efficient and secure development workflow, you can build your project with multiple development environments. Development environments reflect changes to your project schema but not to your content (see Content Staging).

System tokens can have different grants meant for internal tools e.g. for scripts periodically dumping data, for connecting a legacy CMS, or for importing/exporting data.

Using a headless CMS means having a content exit strategy in place all the time. As any content can be fetched via the API in a JSON format, you can pull out your data at any time. There is no vendor lock-in with Hygraph.

Yes, this can be configured. Our user authentication system Auth0 is able to handle this. Auth0 supports the main industry standards such as SAML, WS-Fed, and OAuth 2.0 (OpenID Connect is based on OAuth 2.0) so you can hook any third-party application that you need.

All endpoints of projects have an SSL certificate issued and are kept renewed.

A dedicated solution architect can assist you in the architecture design of your project during the onboarding phase and share best practices from other enterprises relying on Hygraph.

If required, our team will provide you with 24x7 chat, email, and phone support. Service level agreements (SLAs) with different levels of support availability ensure that we will take on resolving your most critical issues within less than an hour.

All users have access to our community Slack channel. Optionally, on enterprise plans, your team can be invited into an internal Slack channel for your organization where our experts and engineers will directly respond to any enquiries specific to your project.

In addition to documentation – updated on an ongoing basis – you can also find answers to your questions in our how-to video library. We also offer technical training (e.g. webinars, live streams, etc.) on a regular basis.

Not at all! Sign up for the Developer plan, our free forever plan that comes with generous feature limits to build out personal projects or MVPs. All you need is to sign up with your email address or via social profiles (GitHub, Facebook, or Google).

Any single piece of content that is stored in Hygraph counts as a record, regardless if it contains one field or many. If you have a schema for "landing page", then every "landing page" content entry counts as a single record, not each field within it.

Assets are any digital files that are uploaded to Hygraph's Digital Asset Manager, or DAM (e.g. images, PDF files, or videos). They are stored in Hygraph and served via a global content delivery network (CDN).

Feel free to reach out to our Sales Team if you have any specific questions regarding plan customization or upgrading! We are happy to work with you on a case by case basis to make sure your plan supports your needs.

In case you are on a paid plan and reach your API Operations and Asset Traffic limits, additional usage will be charged automatically from your credit card at the end of your billing cycle. Overages (every 10,000 API Operations and 1 GB of Asset Traffic) cost USD 10 cents each (USD 10 for every 1 million). If this happens on a free developer plan, usage will be blocked until the next billing period. You can monitor your usage statistics on your project dashboard.

We accept credit cards from all major credit card providers. Enterprise plans can be paid by bank transfer as well.

In most cases, we charge USD. European based customers can also be charged in EUR.

No, the additional usage will be charged at the end of a billing period.

Cached requests are not rate limited. Uncached requests that fetch content from the database are rate limited on the different tiers by default:

• Community: 5req/sec
• Professional: 25req/sec
• Scale: 35req/sec
• Enterprise: >50req/sec

All limits can be lifted. Talk to sales to request a custom plan.

No, there are no limits enforced on requests that hit our CDN cache and such requests don’t count towards your rate limits either.

Yes! We understand that every business has different needs. Our goal is to provide you with the tools that can help you achieve your vision for your projects. The Hygraph Sales Team will work with you to find the best solution for your company.

Service Level Agreements are available in our Enterprise Plans but feel free to reach out to our Hygraph Sales Team about your specific requests and we will see how we can best meet your needs.

There are many other options for support with all of your Hygraph needs! Reach out to us in our Slack Channel, on Intercom (our on-site or in-app chat), or email us at sales@hygraph.com. We also have an extensive collection of documents available on our website that can help you through the onboarding of Hygraph.

No, all prices for our self-service plans are listed on our website in the Pricing section. There are no hidden fees or additional charges on top, with the exception of API-operation and Asset overages, as highlighted before.

Yes! We'd love to accommodate your requests for special projects. Get in touch with us to discuss your project, and we'd be more than happy to talk about how we can support you. We often collaborate with others to support projects, particularly around education and open-source.

When starting a new project in Hygraph, you can choose to start a free 14-day trial of our Scale plan, giving you access to all the features and limits in that plan. If you're working towards a Proof of Concept or MVP for a project at a much larger scale and would like to try out our Enterprise features, get in touch with our Sales team.

After your 14-day free trial expires, you would need to decide between upgrading to one of our paid plans, or downgrading your project to the free Community plan (provided your project has not crossed the limits permitted on the free plan).