When it comes to website content management systems (CMS), two of the most popular options on the market are HubSpot and WordPress. Both platforms offer a variety of features and capabilities, and both come with different strengths and weaknesses.
This article compares HubSpot and WordPress in detail. We analyze what WordPress does best, where it can improve, and when HubSpot may be a better option for some organizations.
TL;DR
Your website is like a 24/7 employee, and for most businesses, it’s their biggest marketing tool. Because of this, choosing the right CMS for your business website is essential. Learn how HubSpot’s powerful CMS features may be the right fit for your company’s website.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the most popular open-source CMS in the world. According to W3Tech, WordPress was used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet in 2022.
WordPress is an open-source platform, meaning it is free to use and can be customized to fit your needs. The CMS is a popular option for businesses of all sizes and industries, and it is particularly well-suited for bloggers and smaller organizations.
WordPress supports plugins to extend and enhance its functionality. WordPress has themes to control the appearance of a website. Envato Market has a WordPress theme marketplace.
What Is HubSpot CMS?
HubSpot CMS is a cloud-based content management system built on top of HubSpot CRM. It offers a drag-and-drop website builder for creating custom pages, templates, and publishing blog posts.
As an all-in-one tool, it allows teams to manage all aspects of their website, including marketing, leads, media management, website analytics, and SEO. HubSpot allows companies to scale as their business grows by incorporating other hubs, such as Marketing, Sales, Operations, Support, and other service packages.
Like WordPress, HubSpot offers a large variety of themes and modules available through the HubSpot Asset Marketplace.
Comparison
| Software Pricing |
Starting from $25/mo |
Free |
| Hosting |
No additional cost |
Anywhere $2.95/mo to $1000/mo |
| Managed |
No additional cost |
At a premium price |
| Scalability |
No additional cost |
Super high price |
| Reliability |
99.95% uptime at no additional cost |
Usually no additional cost but depends on the hosting |
| Maintenance |
No additional cost |
Usually have to pay a developer as hosting company doesn’t cover everything maintenance-related. |
| Content management |
Easy and consistent. Apply brand style guidelines using third-party themes or by paying a developer. |
Easy. Apply brand style guidelines using third-party themes or by paying a developer. |
| Website Appearance |
Consistent controls |
In-consistent controls |
| Flexibility |
Flexible on the client-side. Less flexible on the server-side |
Flexible on the client-side. Flexible on the server-side |
| Integrations |
Easy to integrate with
other platforms |
Easy to integrate with other platforms |
| SEO |
Search engine friendly
out-of-the-box |
Required third-party plugins for SEO |
| Security |
Secure |
Vulnerable to cyber attacks |
| Speed |
Pages load faster |
Generally slow page load speed |
Pricing
Pricing can be broken down into software pricing, hosting pricing, and maintenance pricing. Let’s review and compare each category:
Software pricing
WordPress is an open-source CMS, which means that any user can use it for free. Like any other open-source software (OSS), it is developed in a collaborative way, relying on community contributions. Although WordPress is free to use, keep in mind that it is licensed under GPLv2 (or later), which puts some restrictions on its use. Please consult with a copyright expert before using WordPress.
HubSpot CMS, on the other hand, is the proprietary CMS offered as a product (CMS Hub) by HubSpot. This means that a user has to subscribe to one of the CMS Hub plans. HubSpot does offer free CMS tools, but they are very limited, and I wouldn’t rely on the free package to be able to build a reasonably functional website.
Winner: WordPress
Hosting pricing
WordPress websites must be hosted on a hosting platform. This means that there’s a hosting fee associated with the usage of the platform. WordPress hosting prices range from $2.95/month to $1,000+/month (for larger business websites).
Note that even if you pay thousands of dollars for hosting, the responsibility for things like upgrading themes and plugins and patching security vulnerabilities in themes and plugins still falls to you.
On the other hand, all HubSpot subscriptions come with free premium web hosting. The CMS Hub team takes care of everything.
Winner: HubSpot CMS
Maintenance pricing
WordPress websites can be relatively difficult to maintain. We have come across these two scenarios:
- A WordPress version update breaks your website: Although the WordPress team is diligent in making regular updates to the CMS, sometimes new updates break existing themes and plugins. Your hosting companies may not always be openly supportive in helping you fix website issues related to WordPress version updates.
- Problem with a WordPress theme or plugin on your website: If you encounter a problem with a WordPress theme or plugin, hosting companies may not always cooperate. In this scenario, companies running on WordPress must engage a developer for help.
Unlike WordPress, HubSpot takes care of everything maintenance-related. HubSpot rolls out updates automatically, and it’s a seamless experience for the CMS clients.
Winner: HubSpot CMS
CMS features
The most important purpose of any CMS system is to offer robust features that make it easy to manage and maintain the website. We will focus on the following features: content management, and website appearance. When comparing the features of HubSpot and WordPress, here’s where we land:
Content management
WordPress offers content management features. WordPress installation comes with a pre-bundled default theme. Users can also download free WordPress themes from WordPress.org. While these themes will get you up and running, they do not offer intuitive content management.
There is an option of using commercial WordPress themes, which often offer better content management than the default or free WordPress themes.
On the other hand, HubSpot comes with easy-to-use and intuitive content management. No matter what theme you use, content management remains the same.
Winner: HubSpot CMS
Website Appearance
WordPress themes allow users to customize the appearance of their website by applying their brand style guidelines. But every theme works differently. Users are often expected to hire a developer to apply the company’s brand guidelines, especially if they use a free theme.
HubSpot CMS themes offer better control for customizing the appearance of the website, which remains consistent across themes.
Winner: HubSpot CMS
Flexibility
A good CMS system should also offer flexibility. Identifying this helps users decide if a CMS is a good fit for the long-term management of a website.
WordPress is pretty flexible when it comes to adding new features and extending default functionality. However, you either need to use a third-party plugin or pay a developer to extend the default functions. This does require an extra budget (see Security section).
Like any other propriety system, HubSpot offers less flexibility than open-source solutions. HubSpot CMS is significantly less flexible on the server side. However, on the client side, HubSpot CMS is very flexible.
Winner: WordPress
Integrations
According to BetterCloud 2021 report, companies use an average of 110 SaaS solutions. This number jumps to about 447 for organizations with more than 10,000 employees.
A large number of tools leads to a wide range of challenges - redundant work, miscommunication, data mismanagement, etc.
This is a challenge even in smaller organizations. For example, a business can use Slack for daily communication, Trello for task management, and HubSpot for customer relationship management, all at the same time. As a result, businesses need their CMS to integrate with other platforms they use.
Third-party plugins allow WordPress to integrate well with other platforms. It’s important to note, however, that these third-party plugins only support the most generic use cases. If a user wants to support a specific use case, they need to engage a developer to customize the plugin.
Keep in mind that customizing a plugin to support your use case may have some licensing issues (all WordPress plugins are licensed under GPLv2 (or later)), especially if you are also planning to distribute it to other users.
HubSpot offers a robust App Marketplace, which comes with thousands of apps. Each app offers integration with another platforms. Additionally, you can pay a developer to build a custom HubSpot app for your business, if it's not already available on the HubSpot App Marketplace.
Winner: We have a tie
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important requirements for modern businesses. SEO helps businesses generate leads from their website as well as support their inbound marketing efforts.
WordPress doesn’t support SEO by default and again comes to rely on third-party plugins.
HubSpot, in contrast, has out-of-the-box support for SEO:
Although you could always leverage tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMRush if you want to, you do not have to. HubSpot’s native SEO tools will guys you in making your website search-engine friendly.
Winner: HubSpot CMS
Security
Cybercrime is on the rise. Statista expects cybercrime-related losses to jump from $8.44 trillion in 2022 to $23.84 trillion by 2027. Cybercriminals target websites with weak security. Therefore, choosing a secure CMS for your website is increasingly important.
The core of WordPress CMS is secure. If the users take security seriously and install all the latest updates for the core, as well as perform regular updates for the themes and plugins - WordPress websites should do just fine. The problem occurs when users rely on themes and plugins vulnerable to cyber attacks. “WordPress has almost 60,000 free plugins available in the WordPress.org repository and almost 10,000 themes,” Oliver Sild, CEO of Patchstack, told The Daily Swig. “These are all written by different people with different coding skills.”
Unlike WordPress, HubSpot is inherently a very secure CMS. It uses robust security controls such as Web Application Firewall, data protection through encryption, and organizational security policies to secure websites from cyber attacks. In addition, HubSpot has SOC and GDPR compliance.
Winner: HubSpot CMS
Website loading speed
Loading speed is an essential component of well-performing websites. Over 60% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, and since your phone comes with less processing power than your laptop, websites on mobile devices take longer to load.
To increase user experience and improve your chances of succeeding at SEO (Google introduced mobile-first indexing some time ago), it’s highly recommended that you pay close attention to your website loading speed. To test your website’s performance, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or HubSpot Website Grader.
A lodging speed of a website using WordPress CMS depends on several factors like the hosting place, the theme and the plugins used. Having a slow loading speed is a common problem for WordPress websites. It may not always be possible to make WordPress websites load faster.
HubSpot websites inherently load fast – all thanks to the HubSpot infrastructure, lightweight programming, and content delivery network (CDN).
Winner: HubSpot CMS
Selecting the right CMS for your website
There is not really a clear winner here and it depends on your needs and your budget. For example for companies with low traffic volume WordPress may be the right soltuion.
However, if you are a business which relies on inbound marketing to drive traffic, security is important to you, looking for a long-term scalable CMS, and want a custom design – HubSpot is the better solution.
