Which CMS is Best? HubSpot CMS/COS or WordPress CMS

Designing and development of your website is an important task. If you don’t make the correct decision up front, you could spend countless hours and resources transitioning to a new platform. Two popular CMS platforms, for those with digital marketing in mind, are WordPress and HubSpot.

In this article, we explain what makes each platform unique, along with the benefits and limitations of each so that you can make the best CMS choice for your website.

HubSpot

HubSpot is not a CMS, but a COS — Content Optimization System — a name seal up by HubSpot. HubSpot is an marketing automation platform for websites. The purpose or benefits revolve around the tools to get more visitors, convert more leads, and close more customers. Having the platform built for this purpose is a factor to consider when designing your main website.

HubSpot offers additional tools for email and social media, including the ability to create smart lists that will update over time, and send targeted emails based on criteria like pages visited and comments made on social networks. WordPress doesn’t offer any of these functions, though some are available through plugins.

What about cost? WordPress can be downloaded for free, and it’s possible to set up a simple blog at no cost. But for any more advanced use, there will be costs. HubSpot is not a free platform, and there are costs for design and develop a website in HubSpot.

HubSpot has main three subscription plans, Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. Each plan comes with more stuff including the COS smart blocks which tailor content to the user based on their state in the sales funnel. Basically if they are a lead or customer.

HubSpot will claim that their platform offers more functionality than WordPress and is not simply a tool for improving a site’s organic Google ranking. While this may be true, many of the additional features available in HubSpot are also available for WordPress at a significantly lower cost (or free) using a number of third party tools and plugins.

HubSpot offers a support forum and US-based customer service reps to help users who have an active account. They also provide great marketing advice and tips through their website, inbound.org and HubSpot Academy. HubSpot, as always though, is more marketing focused than design or development focused. Meaning, if you have questions on marketing, they are great, but it may be harder to find the free technical advice, you need in the HubSpot community.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular open sourse CMS for website development. For a while now it’s been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.

WordPress is first choice for most bloggers, but it can also be successfully used for designing simple websites.
One reason for WordPress’s popularity is its simplicity and ease of use. With thousands of themes available, you can build and design a professional looking website without having to learn how to code.

Unlike WordPress however, HubSpot requires you to utilize HubSpot Markup Language (HubL) when pulling in dynamic content. While WordPress uses the common PHP dynamic scripting language which is widely known and used across the majority of CMS’, HubSpot uses HubL which requires developers or those coding in HubSpot to learn a new coding language. HubL is a proprietary language developed by HubSpot and doesn’t allow for the same level of customization that PHP language does.

WordPress does offer plugins for marketers. However, the data between these plugins won’t communicate as meaningfully as a fully fledged marketing automation system, like HubSpot.

While WordPress is open-source software and you can download it for free, it also has costs that can add up.

Both WordPress and HubSpot offer a host of SEO tools that help you optimize your content and analyze your results. These SEO tools come standard in HubSpot, while in WordPress you must purchase the plugins (or download for free) and add them to your site. Yoast SEO and other similar plugins for WordPress are available at no cost.

WordPress has a prolific community of developers and contributors that offer users technical and design tips and advice via documentation, a community support forum and a WordPress handbook, not to mention on YouTube, WordPress.tv, and via other online channels.

Overall, we believe WordPress is the clear choice for two primary choice due to its cost and ownership. HubSpot has created a strong marketing platform that offers us great inbound marketing tools. That’s why we use the marketing package they offer. But when it comes to a CMS, WordPress offers the most value and will ensure you are able to scale your website as your business grows.