These days, your website is the most important representation of your company. It’s the one place where your company’s values, mission, vision, and creative content are on display beside your products or services. It’s where customers connect with you. Having the right content management system (CMS) to create, maintain, and make changes to that website could mean the difference between making connections that matter and missing your mark.
It’s important to remember that every CMS will offer many advantages over coding and maintaining a website without one. A CMS is meant to take many web development and IT issues off your hands so that you can focus on creating and publishing great content and reap the benefits of a functional, aesthetically pleasing website.
WordPress and HubSpot are both well-known CMS options. Let’s compare the CMS offerings of WordPress and HubSpot on the details that matter.
WordPress Pros & Cons
WordPress Positives
- Simple and breezy blogging: WordPress’s original purpose was to give people a place to blog. Today, WordPress is still a leading platform because it gives users a place where they only need to be fluent in the language they’re blogging in, not several coding languages. Your HubSpot blog might be a little more complicated to maintain, so keep that in mind as you choose.
- Simple design and management: It’s easy to make updates that take effect right away. WordPress’s tools make it easy to keep content organized.
- HubSpot integration: Get the advantages of HubSpot’s CRM with the simplicity of WordPress’s CMS. Easily gather leads and create forms through HubSpot integration.
- Web hosting freedom: You can move your website to a different web hosting service anytime you want or need. If your current web host gets expensive or inconvenient, you don’t have to start from scratch.
- Flexible pricing: HubSpot’s bundled pricing means you pay for tools you may not even use. WordPress add-ins are sold separately but purchasing them may help you save more than buying some of the versatile versions of HubSpot.
WordPress Negatives
- It’s a CMS, and that’s it: Where the HubSpot CMS is just one part of its offerings (more on that below), WordPress is a place to create and manage a website, nothing more, nothing less. Capturing leads and creating new contacts will be a challenge because the software won’t help automate those tasks.
- Software tools: WordPress doesn’t offer many options for customizing your site’s appearance, so to go far beyond the traditional templates and themes it offers, you’ll need some development software.
- Similar sites: About 30% of all websites are WordPress sites, so it’s hard to make your site stand out without more advanced design capabilities and lots of hard work.
- Required plugins: Where HubSpot offers a variety of internal tools, everything from SEO to analytics will require a plugin on WordPress, which can complicate things.
HubSpot Pros & Cons
HubSpot Positives
- A full toolset: Unlike WordPress where you’ll have to add many plugins to get help with analytics and search engine optimization (SEO), HubSpot has the tools to work well with your digital marketing efforts.
- Security: HubSpot is equipped with security features to keep your data safe, like a firewall and an intrusion detection system (IDS).
- Your CRM and your CMS, all in one place: If you’re using HubSpot to capture leads and store contacts, all the data your CMS captures through landing pages and contact forms will be stored automatically to your HubSpot dashboard.
- Sophisticated landing pages: Without plugins or any outside tools, HubSpot gives you what you need to make landing pages that are captivating and give your content extra flair.
- Email capabilities: In the same vein as all the other CRM-tie-in capabilities, HubSpot has email marketing capabilities to make it easier to spread the word about your new content as soon as it’s published.
HubSpot Negatives
- Bells and whistles: HubSpot’s goal is to put every tool you need in one place, but that gets complicated. You may need plugins and widgets to get work done in WordPress, but you’ll get to choose the specific tools you need without additions you don’t need.
- Inbound focus: Inbound marketing is an important part of any company’s marketing strategy, but the best approach is an integrated one that uses many tactics to attract customers. HubSpot’s tools are all built for inbound-heavy companies, meaning that if inbound isn’t really your thing, HubSpot may not be, either.
- Price tag: While HubSpot offers worthwhile tools and you should consider it an investment, depending on the tools you need for your website, you may end up paying $1,100 a month. Think about the size of your company and the marketing needs you have when you make a CRM decision.
HubSpot vs. WordPress: What’s Right for You?
WordPress is a great CMS for companies who want beautiful, simple websites. If you already have SEO, web development, and analytics tools that you like using, WordPress is great. It will give you a great place to store, organize, and share content that isn’t over-complicated or crammed with other tools and tasks. It’s a good option when division of labor at your company places digital and content marketing tasks with separate individuals.
HubSpot is a good CMS for companies in industries where having a highly impressive website is an important and expected calling card. For example, design firms that need to market their one-of-a-kind visual perspectives might spring for HubSpot’s CMS because they can make their site look as unique and interesting as their respective companies.
Choosing a CMS is a big commitment for a company. Time and money will be poured into working with the CMS you choose and return on that investment can depend on whether the CMS is the right choice. Analyzing the differences between the two systems can be illuminating, but this choice also requires a great deal of asking your company tough questions about what you really need when it comes to your website. Happy hunting!
Looking for a CMS means you’re at the first step of what can be a fruitful and meaningful journey for your company. For help taking the next steps, schedule a time to talk to us.
