Hygraph

Hygraph, formerly GraphCMS, builds the entire content API around GraphQL rather than bolting it onto a REST-first product, which is the reason developer teams that already use GraphQL elsewhere in their stack tend to reach for it first.

The free Hobby plan needs no credit card and covers two locales, three seats and 1,000 entries with 500,000 API calls a month — enough to build and demo a real project before any purchasing conversation starts. Remote sources let Hygraph federate content from other systems into one API, the same content-federation idea Contentful sells at enterprise scale, offered here from the free tier up.

Hygraph GmbH is registered in Berlin, and the company states on its own site that its infrastructure is ISO 27001 certified, though it does not publish which regions host customer data.

Pricing beyond the free tier starts at Growth for $199 a month, covering ten seats and 10,000 entries with overage billed per million API operations and per gigabyte of asset traffic, and Enterprise is quoted separately with SSO, audit logs and multi-tenancy. As with several other entries here, the founding year is not stated on the vendor's own pages, and pricing is published in dollars rather than euros despite the German base.

What Hygraph does well

• GraphQL-native content API, not REST retrofitted
• Free Hobby plan with no credit card required
• ISO 27001-certified infrastructure, stated by the vendor
• Content federation from remote sources available from the free tier
• German company, EU jurisdiction

Where Hygraph falls short

• Hosting region not specified on the vendor's own pages
• Pricing published in dollars, not euros
• Founding year not published
• Overage charges apply once Growth-plan limits are exceeded

Standout feature. Federation from the free tier: Hygraph is the only CMS in this group that offers Contentful-style content federation before you have paid it anything.