Research suggests that 43% of the entire internet is powered by WordPress. And while the number of sites using HubSpot is much smaller, it’s climbing rapidly, with just shy of 500,000 websites using the platform at time of writing.
If you're a marketer, a developer, or a decision-maker stuck deciding between the platforms, let us help. In this comprehensive guide we offer an unbiased comparison of HubSpot vs WordPress: 20 metrics, followed by a detailed summary - more than enough information to make an informed decision!
Our in-depth comparison covers:
Let’s dive right in.
A Summary of HubSpot
Ask HubBot - the HubSpot AI chatbot - what HubSpot is, and you get an answer with the following info:
- HubSpot is a company that offers a range of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service.
- Their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform assists business in managing and analysing customer interactions and data.
- HubSpot provides tools that attract, engage, and delight customers.
- HubSpot offers users features like content management, SEO, social media marketing, web analytics, blogging, email marketing and more.
- HubSpot is designed to help companies implement and manage inbound marketing strategies by attracting customers from relevant sources and nurturing their journey through your marketing funnel.
A Summary of WordPress
There are two WordPress sites, WordPress.com and WordPress.org:
- WordPress.com includes managed hosting and management of various technical aspects of your site. They offer a range of subscription models that scale with a customer’s needs.
- WordPress.org allows you to download the WordPress source code for yourself and upload it to any hosting provider. This offers a greater level of customisation but comes with a higher requirement of technical expertise.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Platform Costs
There are costs associated with running a website at any scale. Some of these are obvious - hosting, buying a domain name - others, less so. When choosing a platform it’s important to have a clear picture of all costs involved: it helps you budget accordingly, while avoiding any unpleasant surprises.
Setup Costs and Subscriptions
WordPress.com plans start at £8/m for the Starter plan, moving upward through Explorer (£17), Creator (£32), Entrepreneur (£55), Cloud (£51), and Enterprise ($25,000 per year minimum). Discounts are available for paying yearly, up to 62% depending on the package.
WordPress.org carries no setup costs: downloading the software is free.
HubSpot’s setup costs are more complex because they offer a range of products:
- Starter Customer Platform: £18/m
- Marketing Hub: free tools available or £14/m/seat for Starter, £702/m for Professional (includes 3 seats)
- Sales Hub: free tools available or £14/m/seat for Starter, £77/m/seat for Professional
- Service Hub: per Sales Hub
- Content Hub: free tools available or £14/m/seat for Starter, £396/m for Professional (includes 3 seats)
- Operations Hub: free tools available or £14/m/seat for Starter, £630/m for Professional
Note: these monthly prices are pro rata from the annual subscription cost, which includes a discount.
Ongoing Costs
Both HubSpot and WordPress.com require monthly payment when subscribed. Some third-party plugins or apps follow the same model. Other ongoing costs include web hosting, domain name renewal, theme renewal, and associated professional services.
Hidden Costs
For the newcomer to website ownership, many of the costs above could be considered hidden. But for marketers and developers who are familiar with the costs associated, things to look out for include:
- Overage charges: both platforms may charge you if you exceed the limitations of your subscription level
- Custom development: as we’ll see, custom code can expand the functionality of both platforms. If this expertise isn’t present on your team, it’ll cost you extra.
- Data migration: moving your current website configuration to a new platform carries costs.
- Training! Both platforms have barriers to entry and learning curves (see the next section) which may require investment in training to bring your staff up to the required level of expertise.
Platform Costs: Summary
Both platforms have a number of costs attached, and both offer scaling pricing to fit the evolving needs of your business. WordPress.com offers more options and also gives you the option to download the software for free, which gives them the win in this category.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Ease of Use
All CMS require some level of technical knowledge, but the level of complexity can vary massively. Understanding the skill required to navigate the platform, manage and publish content, apply customisations and similar lets you ensure staff are trained to the relevant standard, and that your site will operate with minimal risk of technical troubles.
User Interface
The WordPress interface has a reputation for being daunting at first glance, but once you become familiar it’s fairly easy to manage. On the left are the sections of your site and various settings, on the right is a customisable dashboard where you can get at-a-glance information about your site, and the top bar gives you quick access to various options including publishing content.
A typical WordPress dashboard
Learning Curve
All CMS have a learning curve for new users. In the ideal scenario, users will find it easier to use the system as they become more accustomed, leading to greater efficiency over time.
On the surface, WordPress presents a more simple user interface than HubSpot. However, things quickly become more complex when you begin to explore plugins and non-default functionality.
HubSpot on the other hand, has a steeper initial learning curve due to its extensive functionality, especially if using multiple Hubs. Thankfully, there are extensive support pages available on their website, offering help to users who need to get to grips with the functionality they require.
Community Support
As open source software, WordPress benefits from a large and enthusiastic community where users can ask questions, get help, and even contribute to discussions as they become more experienced. Some examples:
- The WordPress.com support guides
- The WordPress.org support forums
- The WordPress Development Stack Exchange
While smaller, HubSpot also offers a level of support that is capable of addressing and resolving any issues you may encounter, both in the form of a Help Centre and a user community.
Ease of Use: Summary
Both platforms have a learning curve that will take non-technical users a while to acclimatise to, but comprehensive support - both from the developers and the community - are available for both.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Customisation and Flexibility
While both platforms offer diverse functionality out-of-the-box, the majority of users will want to build on this bedrock by using advanced features and customisations. Knowing what the default looks like, what types of customisations are on offer, and the technical skill required to use them further refines your understanding of the platforms’ capabilities and your team’s ability to leverage them.
Themes and Templates
At time of writing WordPress offers 12,174 free themes, as well as thousands more commercial themes and comprehensive documentation for creating your own.
HubSpot offers 510 themes in its template database, and ~200 more are available on Envato, a third-party marketplace. Obviously, this is a significantly smaller number, meaning fewer customisation options than WordPress.
While limited in number, HubSpot’s templates are well-optimised for inbound marketing campaigns and offer plenty of options for customisation, meaning you can still craft a distinctive look and feel for your brand.
Plugins and Extended Functionality
Being open source means WordPress has an extremely active development community, meaning a huge amount of plugins are available offering all sorts of additional functionality (almost 60,000 at time of writing). And while some of these require payment, a significant proportion are free. This means that with enough research and experimentation, it’s possible to greatly expand the default functionality of the platform and create powerful websites.
It’s also possible to create your own plugins, although this requires a high level of technical proficiency.
HubSpot takes a different approach, rolling a far higher number of features into the default software (and bolt-on hubs). The idea is to expand functionality and reduce reliance on third-party plugins - just bear in mind that some users argue this leads to reduced flexibility and versatility.
Code Requirements
If you want to use WordPress without relying on third-party themes and plugins, you very quickly come up against the limitations of the platform. A high level of customisation is possible thanks to WordPress offering full access to its codebase, but remember creating custom themes and plugins requires in-depth knowledge of coding languages including HTML, CSS, PHP, and potentially Javascript: definitely a barrier to consider for non-technical users.
HubSpot allows for customisation within tighter parameters: full access to the codebase is not possible, again contributing to the argument that flexibility and versatility are more limited.
Customisation and Flexibility: Summary
WordPress wins out here thanks to the fact that it’s open source and enjoys incredibly active developer support. It’s hard to think of a functionality that isn’t possible to achieve with a plugin, but sometimes it takes a lot of research and tinkering to get things working properly. Increased reliance on third-party tools can also be seen as a drawback.
HubSpot’s tighter parameters may present a problem depending on what you’re looking to achieve, but if you want a platform with functionality highly-tailored for inbound marketing, then you’re in luck.
Now we think of it, there are some similarities here to the Android vs Apple argument
HubSpot vs WordPress: SEO Potential
Building and maintaining your website is just one piece of the marketing puzzle. Achieving visibility in Google and other search engines makes a significant contribution to your overall marketing performance, and it’s crucial to understand the SEO potential of your CMS from the outset.
Built-in Features
HubSpot has a suite of SEO tools integrated directly into the platform, making it easy for marketers to optimise their content and make refinements according to AI-generated recommendations.
WordPress offers minimal SEO features by default, but there are many established third-party plugins offering more advanced functionality. Note that most of these require paid subscriptions to access full metrics and recommendations.
Plugins and Tools
Using plugins is the only way to access truly valuable SEO insights within WordPress. Plugins like Yoast and AIOSEO offer a range of tools and analysis, giving marketers the opportunity to optimise their content.
While HubSpot’s default SEO features are more sophisticated than WordPress, the options to expand this functionality are relatively limited.
Performance and Speed
Because there are so many ways to customise a WordPress site, the distance between the slowest and fastest sites on the platform are enormous. Out-of-the-box WordPress offers fairly good speeds; some themes can slow things down massively, while technically proficient users can use things like caching and code customisations to greatly streamline the experience.
HubSpot uses a dedicated CDN (content delivery network) to guarantee speed and performance by default.
SEO Potential: Summary
Out-of-the-box, Hubspot definitely wins here. More tools and features are built into the platform, giving marketers an easy way to optimise their content and their overall web experience. This is backed by cloud-based infrastructure for good site speed and performance. However, for WordPress users who are willing to invest time and effort in customising the default functionalities, it is possible to match (and probably surpass) HubSpot’s offering.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Marketing Automation
Tying together the various parts of your marketing leads to a more streamlined experience for you and your prospective customers. By linking disparate systems, you can draw more detailed insights from your data and curate a brand experience tailored to the needs of individual customers. The end result: higher satisfaction and more sales.
Email Marketing
HubSpot has a fully integrated email marketing platform with a range of features to empower users, including automation, personalisation based on customer data, etc. This is a great example of how having all of your marketing data and insights in one unified platform can bring things together effectively.
WordPress fully relies on third-party plugins and platforms for email marketing, often with separate plugins for individual functionalities. For example:
- Mailchimp plugin to sync this platform with your website
- An SMTP plugin to enable your website to send email reliably
- A mail tracker to ensure emails are logged for tracking purposes once sent
Social Media Integration
It’s a similar picture here: HubSpot offers sophisticated integration with various social media platforms, whereas WordPress requires third-party software to achieve the same functionality.
Analytics and Reporting
And here: HubSpot’s Analytics dashboard offers sophisticated and in-depth analysis, drawing on data collected from all areas of the platform. It lets you track everything from traffic figures to sales performance, conversion metrics, and so on from one place.
WordPress can be linked to Google Analytics and other analytics software with third-party plugins, but it offers little to no analytics or reporting functionality out of the box.
Marketing Automation: Summary
This category is where HubSpot really shines: as dedicated inbound marketing software, advanced tools and functionalities are built into the bedrock of the systems. For a marketer wanting a centralised dashboard from which to create, publish and monitor everything, HubSpot is hard to beat.
Similarly to the SEO potential category, WordPress can be made far stronger than its default position by users with time and technical expertise. While its marketing automation capabilities are limited, plugins and third-party solutions exist to expand these areas.
The question here is how reliant do you want to be on third-party software? The more entangled you become in interlinked third-party tools, the more prone your website becomes to technical issues and even security breaches. Which brings us onto our next section.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Security
It’s a sad fact that websites are vulnerable to all sorts of security threats, from hardware failure to deliberate attacks from malicious actors. You need to know that your site is safe from harm and backed up in case the worst should occur. HubSpot and WordPress both include plenty of security features; in this section, we’ll outline what’s on offer.
Built-in Features
HubSpot and WordPress.com (the version with integrated hosting) both offer SSL, user roles, and password protection as default security features.
Also offered are:
- HubSpot
- Firewall protection to reduce the threat of malicious attacks
- Regular updates to address known vulnerabilities
- Alerts to flag potential security risks to users
- WordPress
- File integrity monitoring to inform users if site files are tampered with
- Automatic updates to address known vulnerabilities
HubSpot vs WordPress: Plugins and Tools
As you might expect by now, the security of WordPress can be improved with third-party plugins, with ones like Wordfence protecting against malware, brute force attacks and similar. You can also achieve granular functionality like hiding the login page, adding ultra-admin accounts, and similar.
However, plugins risk becoming security vulnerabilities themselves if they are not kept up to date, as hackers and other bad actors identify and exploit weak code.
HubSpot’s security is managed mainly at a top level, meaning third-party security options are fewer and farther between than WordPress’s.
Data Backup and Recovery
HubSpot takes regular snapshots of its systems but cannot, by default, offer individual user backup. An app available through the HubSpot App Marketplace adds this functionality.
WordPress, too, must use third-party tools to achieve this functionality. WordPress.org users can opt to use hosting providers that offer backup and restore functionality.
Security: Summary
While both platforms offer satisfactory support out-of-the-box, WordPress offers greater levels of security customisation.
This expanded offering is also a source of vulnerability, though, so tread carefully. We always recommend having some way to backup and restore your site, whether this be at the software or server level—whichever platform you go for, ensure you’ve familiarised yourself with the options.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Scalability
The goal for any brand is to expand, and whether this happens gradually over time or in a sudden rush, your website needs to be able to handle the growth. Here, we’ll drill down into each platform’s capability to scale with your business.
How the Platforms Handle Growth
As a dedicated inbound marketing platform, HubSpot is incredibly good at scaling your business. As we mentioned earlier, three subscription levels are available - Free, Starter, and Professional - each granting access to a suite of features designed to support the evolving marketing needs of a growing business.
With the option to add or remove additional Hubs as required, the range of functionality offered can change along with its scale, too: this means that HubSpot will scale with your business whether it increases in size, offering, or both.
WordPress is also able to scale, as evidenced by the six subscription levels available, ranging from Free to Enterprise. However, because functionality, more often than not, requires third-party plugins, you are more responsible for ensuring that the precise configuration you arrive at can scale. It’s also likely that the costs associated with some (or all) of the third-party plugins will increase along with the platform cost as your needs become more advanced.
Limitations and Bottlenecks
This is WordPress’ main weakness: plugin conflicts, performance issues, and maintenance overheads are all liable to occur as your website becomes more complex. If you decide to use WordPress, you’ll need to invest time and technical expertise into maintaining your site as you grow: something largely taken care of for you with HubSpot.
Scalability: Summary
For marketers and decision-makers who want a CMS that scales easily with their business, HubSpot is the winner. The company has invested enormous sums of money into fine-tuning their software to meet and exceed the needs of customers of all sizes, meaning a sophisticated and powerful offering. While WordPress users can achieve something similar, doing so requires much higher levels of customisation and maintenance, putting it out of reach for a sizeable number of business owners.
HubSpot vs WordPress: Your Questions Answered
We hope that this guide has been useful in informing you about your decision on whether to choose HubSpot or WordPress for your business. To recap, here’s our winner for each category:
- Platform costs: WordPress because there’s the option to use the software for free
- Ease of use: A draw
- Customisation and flexibility: WordPress thanks to the incredibly active developer community
- SEO potential: HubSpot thanks to its sophisticated integrated features
- Marketing automation: HubSpot by a long shot
- Security: HubSpot because WordPress’ power also presents a vulnerability
- Scalability: HubSpot
That’s 4 to HubSpot, 2 to WordPress, and 1 draw.
