Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Agility CMS to Hygraph
We are the Agility CMS to Hygraph migration experts
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Challenges with Agility CMS
Key pain points
The pricing is the elephant in the room. Starting at $1,249/month for the lowest tier, Agility is significantly more expensive than most headless CMS competitors. For smaller agencies or startups, that's a hard sell when platforms like Sanity or Contentful offer free tiers and more gradual scaling. If a client needs template customizations beyond what's available, those changes often require going through Agility's team at additional cost, which can slow things down.
The editor experience, while better than most headless CMS tools, still has rough edges. The content preview has a noticeable delay which frustrates editors used to real-time feedback. Component nesting can feel limited when building complex layouts, and creating unique page designs sometimes requires creating an excessive number of components as workarounds. The initial setup and configuration is also more involved than the marketing suggests, particularly for teams coming from traditional CMS platforms.
The ecosystem and community are noticeably smaller than competitors like Contentful or Sanity. There's less community-generated content, fewer third-party plugins, and Stack Overflow coverage is thin. When you hit an edge case, you're more reliant on the support team than community knowledge. The platform also lacks JSON field support in content models, which limits some advanced use cases that other headless CMS tools handle natively.
Expensive entry point
Starting at $1,249/month with no free tier, it's one of the priciest headless CMS options. Hard to justify for smaller projects or clients with lean budgets.
Slow content preview
The preview function has a noticeable delay before changes appear, making it less immediate compared to tools like Sanity or Storyblok that offer real-time feedback.
Steep initial setup
Despite marketing claims of simplicity, the initial configuration requires significant effort. Advanced features and custom setups demand real technical expertise.
Limited component nesting
Building complex, deeply nested layouts can feel restrictive. You often end up creating numerous individual components as workarounds for unique page designs.
Small community and ecosystem
Far fewer plugins, community resources, and Stack Overflow answers compared to Contentful or Sanity. When you hit edge cases, you're mostly on your own.
Missing JSON field support
No native JSON datatype in content models, which limits flexibility for advanced structured data use cases that other headless CMS platforms handle easily.
Benefits of Hygraph
Key advantages
Hygraph's GraphQL-first setup isn't a gimmick. Queries are precise, you only fetch what you need, and the schema is generated from your content model automatically. Content teams get a clean UI, and developers get proper typing out of the box.
The standout feature is Content Federation: you can pull external REST or GraphQL APIs into Hygraph and query them alongside your content through a single endpoint. That replaces a lot of duct-taped backend glue. Workflows, localization, roles, and staging all come built in.
If you're weighing it up (or trying to untangle an existing setup), talk to us, we've shipped several Hygraph builds and know where the edges are.
GraphQL-first API architecture
Hygraph gives developers precise and predictable queries without over-fetching or duct-taping endpoints. If you're comfortable with GraphQL, go ahead with it.
Multi-region content delivery
Your content gets served from the closest region, so pages load fast everywhere without you having to think about infrastructure.
Fast geo-distributed responses
Because their CDN actually does its job, API calls resolve quickly across regions which is perfect for apps that can’t afford to wait on slow round-trips.
External API integration support
Hygraph’s content federation lets you pull in data from other APIs and treat everything like one unified system without any custom backend glue or microservice jungle.
Generous free tier offering
You can build real projects without paying a penny. It’s surprisingly capable for prototyping, small sites, or testing before you commit budget.
Automated webhook capabilities
All the updates trigger instantly with clean webhooks, which is great for syncing builds, triggering workflows, or piping data into other systems without manual overhead.
Common questions
Agility CMS to Hygraph migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Agility CMS to Hygraph migration
How do we migrate away from Agility CMS?
Agility CMS content is accessible through their REST API, so extracting pages, content lists, and media is doable with scripted API calls. The trickier part is the page management layer. Agility's built-in sitemap and page routing don't have direct equivalents in most headless CMS platforms, so that logic needs to be rebuilt in your frontend. We typically budget 4 to 8 weeks for Agility migrations depending on how deeply the page management features are used.
Is Agility CMS worth the price?
At $1,249/month minimum with no free tier, Agility is one of the priciest headless CMS options available. For teams that genuinely need built-in page management, SEO tools, and generous API limits, the cost can be justified. But most mid-sized teams we work with find they can get the same results with a platform like Sanity at a fraction of the cost, especially when you factor in Agility's additional charges for template customisations that go beyond their standard offerings.
What are the biggest risks of staying on Agility CMS?
The small ecosystem is the long-term concern. With fewer community resources, plugins, and Stack Overflow coverage than competitors, you're heavily reliant on Agility's support team for edge cases. The preview delay frustrates editors who are used to real-time feedback, and component nesting limitations force workarounds as your design system grows. If Agility ever changes pricing or direction, the limited community means fewer migration guides and less shared knowledge to help you move.
Is Hygraph easy for non-technical editors to use?
It's decent but not great. Hygraph's editor UI is clean and approachable for basic content updates, but the moment your content model gets complex (nested components, multiple locales, lots of reference fields), editors start feeling overwhelmed. The interface slows down with large datasets, and the GraphQL-native approach means the editorial experience is shaped by developer decisions more than in other headless CMS platforms. We've set up Hygraph for teams where editors managed well after proper onboarding, but it requires more hand-holding than something like Sanity's Studio, which was designed with editorial experience as a first-class priority.
How does Hygraph compare to other headless CMS options?
Hygraph's standout feature is Content Federation, which lets you pull data from external APIs into a unified GraphQL layer. That's genuinely useful if you're aggregating content from multiple sources. Compared to Contentful, Hygraph is cheaper at the lower tiers and more developer-friendly if your team already knows GraphQL. Compared to Sanity, Hygraph offers less flexibility in content modelling and lacks real-time collaboration in the editor. The free tier is generous for small projects. For larger builds, we usually recommend Sanity because the customisation ceiling is much higher and you're not locked into GraphQL as your only query language.
What does Hygraph cost as you scale?
Hygraph's Hobby plan is free with 3 seats, 1,000 content entries, 500K API operations, and 2 locales. The Growth plan is $199/month with 10 seats, 10,000 entries, 1M API operations, and 3 locales. Overages on Growth are $0.20 per 10,000 API operations. Enterprise is custom pricing and typically unlocks 200+ seats, 1M+ entries, 50M+ API operations, up to 80 locales, plus SSO and dedicated infrastructure. The catch is the same as it has always been, high-traffic sites burn through included operations fast, and Content Federation queries count against your limits too. Model your expected API usage before committing.
What's the hardest part of migrating from Hygraph?
Content extraction is actually straightforward since everything comes out through GraphQL queries. The harder part is rebuilding whatever Content Federation layer you've set up, because that logic lives inside Hygraph and doesn't export. If you've wired up three or four external APIs through federation, you'll need to replicate those integrations in your application layer. The other pain point is schema translation. Hygraph's content model maps to GraphQL types, and converting those to another CMS's schema (especially one that uses GROQ or REST) takes careful planning. We typically budget 4-8 weeks for a Hygraph migration depending on content volume and federation complexity.
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