Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Kentico to Hygraph
We are the Kentico to Hygraph migration experts
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Challenges with Kentico
Key pain points
Here’s the reality check about Kentico. It isn’t cheap. Licensing, implementation, and support can feel like a CFO jump-scare. And while the interface is friendly at first glance, once you get into migrations, upgrades, or deeper customisation, things get… heavy.
Major version updates can introduce breaking changes, permissions get messy at scale, and multi-tenant setups mean one bug can take down every project sharing the stack. The docs and community aren’t as deep as the open-source world either, so when something goes wrong, you’ll likely need a developer rather than a forum thread to save you. If you can absorb the overhead and like Corporate Memphis art, go ahead. But before you go ahead, give us a call, and we will try to set up a better solution for you.
Steep learning curve
Kentico’s power comes with complexity. Newcomers and smaller teams often need time (and developers) to actually start working.
High cost for licenses and maintenance
Licensing and maintenance can add up quickly, which makes Kentico a harder sell for startups or smaller organizations.
Upgrades can get messy
Major version jumps, migrations, or deep API changes sometimes introduce breaking changes, which, trust us, is not fun if your site has years of custom logic.
UI feels dated at scale
As projects grow, the dashboard can get cluttered and less intuitive. It works, but it’s not winning design awards, unless you are still competing in 2015.
Limited community support.
Support exists, but the ecosystem isn’t as loud or as active as WordPress (not our first choice), Webflow, or headless-first platforms like Sanity.
Customizations risk impacting all sites
In multitenant setups, a poorly built custom feature can impact every site in the cluster, which means you can't move or change a single line of code, unless you love 404 messages.
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
Kentico to Hygraph migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Kentico to Hygraph migration
How much does a Kentico migration typically cost?
Kentico migrations are enterprise-scale projects. For a site with 1,000 to 10,000 pages, expect the migration itself to run 8 to 16 weeks of development time. The cost depends on how deeply you've customised Kentico's marketing automation, e-commerce, and workflow features. Simple content-only migrations are faster, but most Kentico installations have years of custom .NET logic that needs to be rebuilt or replaced. We've seen total migration budgets range from $30,000 to $150,000 depending on scope, which still often pays for itself within 18 months through reduced licensing and maintenance costs.
Why are companies migrating away from Kentico?
Licensing costs are the initial trigger for most conversations we have. Kentico's annual fees add up fast, especially when you include maintenance, hosting, and the cost of .NET developers to keep it running. But the deeper issue is agility. Major version upgrades introduce breaking changes that can destabilise sites with years of custom logic. The admin UI feels dated as projects scale. Multi-tenant setups carry real risk since one bad customisation can take down every site in the cluster. Teams eventually decide the operational overhead isn't worth it.
What's the biggest challenge when migrating from Kentico?
Untangling the all-in-one features. Kentico bundles marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, workflows, and content management into one platform. When you migrate away, each of those capabilities needs a new home. Content goes to your new CMS, email automation might move to a tool like Resend or Customer.io, and e-commerce might need a dedicated platform. We map out every feature your team actually uses before writing a single migration script, because the biggest risk is discovering a dependency mid-project that nobody documented.
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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