Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Webflow to Hygraph
We are the Webflow to Hygraph migration experts
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Challenges with Webflow
Key pain points
Now for the part Webflow doesn't put on their homepage. Pricing escalates fast. The $23/month CMS plan sounds reasonable until you pass 2,000 items and get forced onto the $39/month Business plan, and enterprise contracts run $60,000+ a year for high-traffic sites. The CMS editor is the other pain point everyone loves to hate. Tiny text fields, awkward formatting, and the occasional "why did hitting save unpublish my article?" moment. Not the confidence you want from a content platform.
Then there are the technical walls. Only one designer can edit the canvas at a time. Reference fields have shallow depth. CMS reference limits force strange workarounds for anything resembling real relational content. And if you ever want to leave Webflow, the exported code drops CMS content, interactions, and animations, so your "no-code" site suddenly needs code everywhere.
Expensive pricing tiers
Webflow starts cheap, but the moment you need CMS items, traffic, or team features, the bill jumps fast. If you want just 10 pages, go ahead. But if you need an enterprise website, we suggest reconsidering.
Outdated CMS editor interface
For all the design polish, the CMS editor feels stuck in another decade. Tiny text fields, formatting quirks, and the occasional “why did that unpublish my live page?” moment doesn't help content teams move fast.
CMS reference limitations
Complex content models often require hacks, workarounds, or custom code anyway, which defeats the “no-code” dream. It doesn't have repeaters or shallow reference depth, and collection limits add friction to what should be simple tasks.
Single-designer collaboration limit
Only one designer can work in the Webflow canvas at a time. On larger projects, this turns teamwork into a queue.
Third-party integration dependency
If you need advanced features, prepare to stitch in custom code or third-party services. The plugin ecosystem is small, so extending Webflow usually means bolting on tools outside the platform.
Limited export functionality
You can export your site, but you lose CMS features, interactions, and animations the moment you do. It’s more like a one-way door than a portable build.
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
Webflow to Hygraph migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Webflow to Hygraph migration
How much does Webflow cost?
Webflow's pricing is layered and confusing. Site plans (billed yearly) start at $14/month for Basic, $23/month for CMS with 2,000 items, and $39/month for Business with up to 20,000 items. Those are per-site. Workspace plans are separate at $19/month (Core) or $49/month (Growth) for teams, plus $16-$35/month for Freelancer or Agency plans. Ecommerce runs $29, $74, or $212/month depending on the tier. Enterprise pricing starts around $60,000/year. The real cost surprise comes from CMS item caps and bandwidth overages, a single CMS site that grows past 2,000 items forces a jump to Business.
How do I migrate from Webflow to a headless CMS?
We export your Webflow content through their API, restructure it for the target CMS (usually Sanity), and rebuild the frontend in Next.js. The content migration itself is straightforward. The tricky part is recreating Webflow's visual design in code, especially custom interactions and animations. Most migrations take 4-6 weeks. The payoff is a faster site, no per-page CMS limits, and a frontend your developers can actually version control.
What are the best Webflow alternatives?
For designers who want visual control, Framer is the closest alternative with better performance. For teams that need a proper CMS backend, Sanity paired with a custom Next.js frontend gives you far more flexibility. If you just need a simple marketing site and don't want to code, Framer or Squarespace will get you there cheaper than Webflow's higher tiers. The right choice depends on whether you're outgrowing Webflow's CMS limits or its pricing.
How do I understand Webflow pricing?
Think of it as two separate bills. First, your Site plan, which covers hosting, CMS items, bandwidth, and form submissions for each individual site. Second, your Workspace plan, which covers team seats, staging sites, and collaboration features. You pay both. A solo freelancer on one site might spend $23/month. A team of five managing three sites easily lands between $300 and $500/month. Always check CMS item limits before launching, because the cap for the CMS plan is 2,000 items and hitting it forces an immediate upgrade to Business.
Can I export my Webflow site and host it elsewhere?
Technically yes, but you lose almost everything that makes Webflow useful. Exported code strips out CMS content, interactions, animations, and form handling. You get static HTML and CSS. For most teams, exporting means rebuilding. That's why we recommend migrating to a headless CMS and custom frontend rather than trying to salvage exported Webflow code. It's cleaner, faster, and you end up with something maintainable.
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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