HubSpot vs WordPress or why you should switch to HubSpot in 2024

In the last couple of years, digitalization has reached unprecedented scale and low-code and no-code solutions have received unprecedented impetus in their development. If we are talking about an ordinary user, an ordinary business, who wants to start or strengthen its presence on the Web, the first thing that comes to mind is the free CMS WordPress.

Its advantages are obvious:

• Price (it's free, so as most plugins for it)
• Scalability
• A large number of developers who are able to do something on WordPress for relatively modest money

What are HubSpot's advantages in comparison with WordPress?

• HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service software that offers a wide range of tools for different aspects of your business, such as email marketing, social media, SEO, and content creation. This can be more efficient and cost-effective than using multiple different tools and plugins with WordPress.
• HubSpot provides detailed analytics and reporting capabilities that allow you to track and analyze your website visitors, leads, and customers. This can help you make data-driven decisions about your marketing and sales efforts and monitor the success of your campaigns. So no need for additional tools and plugins there.
• HubSpot offers a wide range of integrations with other software and platforms, such as Google Analytics and Salesforce. This can help you streamline your sales process and improve communication between different teams and departments.
• HubSpot has in-built lead management, contact management and CRM which can be configured to your business processes.
• HubSpot provides a high-level of automation that can save time and increase productivity.
• HubSpot's support and developer resources are vast and you can easily find solutions to your issues. Plus cost-free HubSpot Academy that could help even beginners to become a pro in various HubSpot tools. 
  
  

But what about site development? I’ll explain it below.

What is HubSpot CMS?

HubSpot CMS - it is a constantly evolving infrastructure for developing modern websites. But, instead of WordPress, you can forget about servers and databases, HubSpot takes care of all of it so you can focus on your website.

As Wordpress HubSpot has a wide range of free templates that you can download from HubSpot assets market. 

But in case you don’t like any of HubSpot’s templates, you can build the theme by your own and, instead of WordPress, building the HubSpot’s templates is not so complicated as it seems. HubSpot has a module structure, so you can build and reuse the same modules in different templates (and pages) for your needs. Even beginners in HTML/CSS can understand the interface and easily build nice looking templates.

Probably this is the main plus of HubSpot CMS. You can apply growth driven design concepts, when a simple landing page can evolve into a huge website in several iterations. Updating the template with new modules would take several minutes, while in WordPress you will need to do deep changes and install more and more plugins.

HubSpot is a marketing tool, not a "mutated" blogging platform

To understand why WordPress is the way it is, you have to delve into the history of its creation. An online store? A business card site? A big news portal? No. WordPress was created twenty years ago as a free, open source solution for the growing popularity of personal blogs. 

HubSpot was originally conceived as an ecosystem for integrated marketing, where the blog and website are an important part of it, but not the main one. Our experience shows that some clients use HubSpot for marketing, because it easily allows them to work with user bases, organize mailing lists, create new landing pages in a few minutes, do A/B tests and dynamically change content depending on the user, his behavior and location.

Can WordPress do it all? CMS itself - no. Yes, all this can be done with the help of third-party plugins and services, but in the first place - you will need to store the customer base in different places or give access to it to different plugins, and secondly, as often happens, plugin developers who lose interest in their products, do not update them for new versions of WordPress, so they simply stop working. In HubSpot, on the other hand, all the functionality is within the ecosystem, and is available in a few clicks.

Created originally for marketing purposes, HubSpot has a user-friendly ui that allows you to quickly figure out most of the functionality described above, while the WordPress admin panel varies depending on the plugins you install. 

What does the HubSpot starter bundle provide?

Okay, the big question is price, right? The cost of the HubSpot starter bundle is $15/month/user, and that's enough for:

• CMS (website pages / landings / blog)
• Data gathering tools (configuration of forms and submissions data handling)
• Contacts database & lists
• Mails creation and sending
• Analytical tools
• Sales tools
• Access to assets marketplace

How much would the same functionality cost on the WordPres? Exactly, much more than “Netflix & HBO Max subscription” right? Plus a lot of functional & structural changes can be done in HubSpot without a developer that also decreases the pricing of project support.

In HubSpot vs Wordpress comparison article, HubSpot states that yearly estimated cost for supporting the WordPress project (including the security, hosting & paid plugins) could be from $5 000 to $80 000, same time The most expensive plan for HubSpot Content Hub is $18,000 per year. 

To summarize