If you’re leading growth or digital strategy at a B2B company, your CMS decision is a strategic move you need to make. The right platform can accelerate campaign velocity, empower your marketing team, and scale alongside your brand.
Both Contentful and Hygraph offer powerful approaches to managing content, but they’re built for different kinds of teams and maturity levels.
As a web development agency, Webstacks has helped numerous B2B startups and enterprises modernize their marketing infrastructure using headless CMS platforms like these.
We’ve seen firsthand how headless and composable architectures unlock performance and control for marketing and growth teams, not just developers.
In this guide, we’ll help you make the best decision for your organization’s content operations, velocity, and long-term scalability. Whether you're replatforming from WordPress or scaling into new regions, we’ll walk you through the best use cases of each CMS.
Contentful vs Hygraph at a Glance
Both Contentful and Hygraph are modern headless CMS platforms, built with flexibility, scale, and developer control in mind.
They break content free from rigid page-based structures, allowing you to distribute it across any frontend, from websites to apps to digital products. But their approach and ideal use case differs.
Contentful
- Architecture: API-first, headless CMS
- Best for: Enterprise teams managing complex, multi-region content
- Strengths: Content modeling, localization, enterprise workflows, integrations
- Pricing Model: Tiered plans with usage-based overages
- UI Focus: Enterprise-grade interface for structured content creation
You can get a better idea of what it’s like to migrate from a traditional CMS to Contentful in our iTrustCapital customer story.
Hygraph
- Architecture: GraphQL-native, composable, and federated
- Best for: Developer-led teams building dynamic, API-driven digital experiences
- Strengths: Schema federation, performance, developer experience, content mesh capabilities
- Pricing Model: Usage-based with pricing tied to federated content requests
- UI Focus: Lightweight, developer-friendly UI with growing tools for marketers
Who Are Contentful and Hygraph Built For?
Both Contentful and Hygraph check the same core boxes: headless, API-first, composable-friendly. But each platform is built with a different primary user and maturity stage in mind.
Contentful is Built For Structured Scale
If you’re leading a mid-market or enterprise B2B company with:
- Multiple regions or product lines
- A global content team
- The need for consistent governance and workflows
Contentful delivers the content infrastructure to support it. We often recommend it to clients scaling fast across geographies or managing brand consistency across divisions.
Hygraph is Built for Composability and Speed
If you’re at a high-growth SaaS or product-led company that:
- Needs to ship fast
- Has multiple data sources
- Prioritizes developer autonomy
Hygraph gives you the flexibility to orchestrate your content from anywhere and ship quickly. It's popular with digital teams using modern frameworks like Next.js or Remix, and works well for integrating dynamic content from APIs and external services.
Editorial Experience and Marketing Autonomy
One of the biggest factors in choosing a CMS, especially for B2B marketing teams, is how well non-technical users can work within it. The trade-off between developer flexibility and marketing autonomy shows up clearly when comparing Contentful and Hygraph.
Contentful: Mature Editorial Experience with Structure-First Workflows
Contentful offers a polished UI built around structured content models. Editors can work confidently within predefined fields and content types.
For larger teams with content governance needs, this structure helps reduce errors and enforce consistency.
But it comes with a learning curve, and marketers need to understand the model before they can publish effectively.
Hygraph: Developer-First Tooling with Improving Marketer Support
Hygraph is dev-focused, but it’s evolving fast. Its UI is clean and simple, although it lacks some of the polish and UX guidance that Contentful provides for editorial users.
It excels in giving technical marketing teams speed and flexibility. If your marketers are comfortable working with schemas or you have a strong web team acting as a buffer, Hygraph offers autonomy.
Localization, Personalization, and Multisite Management
For global B2B brands, or those with ambitions to scale internationally, your CMS needs to support localized messaging, maintain brand consistency across regions, and give you the flexibility to personalize user experiences.
Contentful: Built-In Localization and Multi-Site Orchestration
Contentful is the clear choice when localization and multi-region management are top priorities. Its native support for locales lets you create and manage translations for each field in a scalable way. It also handles shared content blocks, so you’re not duplicating efforts across sites or regions.
Multisite management is possible through environments, space configurations, and role-based permissions, which give enterprise teams the tools they need to operate globally with control.
This enables:
- Centralized governance with regional flexibility
- Streamlined localization workflows across teams and vendors
- Consistent design and structure across multiple microsites
Hygraph: Flexible Localization via Schema Configuration and API Orchestration
Hygraph supports localization, but leans on its composable nature to let teams define how it works.
You can build language-specific models, use field-level localization, or orchestrate translated content from external services using remote sources.
This flexibility is powerful, but it puts more responsibility on your development team to configure it properly.
It’s a great fit if you’re already operating within a microservices or multilingual framework.
This allows for:
- Custom localization flows that match your stack and workflow
- Integration with external translation platforms
- Dynamic content delivery from federated APIs
Performance, Scalability, and Integration Ecosystem
B2B marketing teams rely on their CMS to deliver content across a growing number of channels and experiences. Whether you’re managing a single site or orchestrating a complex digital ecosystem, your CMS needs to scale with you.
Contentful: Proven Enterprise Scale With a Deep Integration Ecosystem
Contentful is built for scale. Its infrastructure supports fast, reliable content delivery globally. It also offers service-level agreements and enterprise-level support, which is important for companies where downtime isn’t an option.
The CMS also plugs into numerous B2B tools, from digital asset management platforms such as Bynder to analytics platforms like Segment.
Hygraph: Lightweight, Developer-First Performance with GraphQL Federation
Hygraph’s GraphQL-native approach delivers precise, minimal queries, which is especially valuable for apps or websites that rely on dynamic content from multiple APIs.
You can stitch together content from multiple services into a single schema. This is ideal for composable architectures where performance depends on unifying multiple content and data sources in real time.
Still Considering Other CMS Platforms?
If your team is still exploring what the ideal CMS looks like, it helps to step back and think about your content model, development workflow, and long-term scalability.
Here are a few other platforms we recommend exploring:
- Sanity: Schema-in-code CMS built for flexibility and customization. Ideal for dev-first teams managing complex, structured content.
- Storyblok: Combines structured content with a visual editor. A good fit for marketing-led teams working across multiple regions or languages.
- Prismic: Quick to set up with a visual editor built around reusable components. Best for lean teams shipping campaign sites or landing pages.
Webstacks helps B2B companies evaluate and implement, the right CMS based on their unique circumstances. If you’re transitioning from a traditional CMS to a headless one, we recommend downloading our implementation checklist to help you prepare for the migration:
Explore more comparison guides:
Final Tips
Both Contentful and Hygraph are powerful platforms. They’re built for flexibility, performance, and composability, making either a strong choice for modern B2B marketing teams. Here’s a quick recap to help you decide.
Choose Contentful if:
- You’re operating across multiple regions or languages and need mature localization tools.
- You have a structured content model and want governance, workflows, and role-based controls.
- You’re an enterprise or mid-market team with long-term scalability and editorial visibility as top priorities.
Choose Hygraph if:
- You’re building composable experiences that pull content from multiple systems.
- You have a dev-heavy team using modern frameworks and want to move fast without CMS overhead.
- You’re launching a new digital product or SaaS experience and need flexible, federated content delivery.
At Webstacks, we believe the right CMS depends on your team structure and growth goals. Get in touch with our team to kickstart your website migration process.
