HubSpot CMS vs. WordPress: A Comprehensive Comparison for 2024 #HubSpot

Welcome to the Sidekick Strategy Expert interviews where today's digital battlegrounds are explored by the best in the business. Are you ready to dive deep into the world of CMS giants? In one Corner we have WordPress, the powerhouse of versatility and customization. In the other Corner we have HubSpot CMS, the seamless integrator of marketing, sales and service. Join us as we unravel the strengths, the quirks and the game changing features of the of these two CMS titans. Whether you're a seasoned developer, a savvy marketer, or just CMS curious, this is the showdown you won't want to miss. Today's experts dissect debate and deliver insights that could revolutionize your digital presence. WordPress or HubSpot CMS, which will be your ally in the digital arena? Let's find out. Vin is Impact's head of website strategy and has been helping companies drive real revenue growth from their websites for over 12 years by coaching and training clients on how they can optimize and improve results in house without the need of an outsourced agency. Mary is Impact's lead website strategist. She's been at Impact for over two years, but has been working on websites and inbound marketing strategy for over 10 years now. With that out of the way, let's jump into the good stuff and see what CMS will prevail. All right, now that we got all of that fun stuff out in the beginning, you know we've got experts in the room. At least that's what I said. But I want to dig in. Let's start with why you're in this room, why we're creating this video together. What experience do you have with creating WordPress and HubSpot CMS websites? Let the audience know.

Well, ladies first. Right, so I'll start. I've worked at two different agencies over the last eight years or so and so I have done inbound marketing and web strategy for hundreds, hundreds of clients over that last eight years over both platforms, primarily those two platforms. So lots of experience. Different industries, different clients, clients, different everything.

Yeah, for the, the last 12 years. I actually started as a WordPress developer. George, I don't know if you even know that about me. The bread and butter has been very much HubSpot. We do still build in WordPress when the, the time makes sense. And sometimes it does, which is exactly why I'm excited to dig through what we're going to dig through today.

I love that so much. Because ladies and gentlemen, if you did the quick math, which I did because it was simple. That's like 20 years basically of experience with WordPress and HubSpot Simple CMS. Not that HubSpot CMS or WordPress have been around for 20 years. Hex has the Internet been around for 20 years? Anyway, let's get into why you're here, Vin and Mary. We're going to start with ease of use because a lot of folks that are looking at this, watching this content, they're marketers. Somebody told them that they need to redo the website. They're scared. They're like, maybe it should be squarespace. No, it shouldn't. Anyway, we're going to talk about WordPress. You know, maybe it's like, I don't know, you're going to do it on MySpace or something. No, you're not. You're not. WordPress or HubSpot CMS are the two that you're looking at. And so let's talk about ease of use. How user friendly are HubSpot CMS and WordPress for beginners in general? Like just unpack your brain on that question.

So I'll say both can and are used by marketers, which is great. WordPress started as a blogging platform, right? So bloggers, marketers, no, WordPress. And they can be relatively simple in certain ways, right? We're moving toward the world of drag and drop. Things are drag and drop. So we have that ability within HubSpot now, which makes it really, really easy. The point is with the CMS is hopefully no coding for our marketers. Right? That's what we want. So it's about non developers being able to use these things. So they can be simple. They aren't always simple. I will say, and I know that for some people WordPress can be a little more difficult if they don't have something like elementor that allows WordPress to be drag and drop and to have those kind of easier content editor type feels to it. So you're going to hear us talk about WordPress out of the box versus WordPress plus stuff a lot. And Vin can elaborate on that.

That's exactly it. Like WordPress is making changes to their core as well. Rolling out Gutenberg, which for any geeky folks, it's just their updated core, right? And to Mary's point, it's about drag and drop. HubSpot made that jump as well a few years back to make more things drag and drop. But it does ultimately come down to how your environment and your ecosystem is set up. Because on both sides of this coin gang, I have Seen some atrocious setups that are really hard for someone that is not a code geek like myself to understand and make updates and. And y' all that stinks for everybody involved and it's not fun. So at the end of the day both can be insanely user friendly. In my experience, the time to jumping in and getting your hands dirty and really understanding it's usually less inside of HubSpot. There's a few reasons for that interface being simplified in certain ways and we're gonna talk about this in a few minutes but WordPress does have the ability to super duper complicate things with different customizations and integrations and that can immediately impact the ease of use for someone that's not living and breathing web world. Nine times out of ten, right?

Yeah. It's funny because you mentioned this Mary. WordPress plus and I think about plugins and I remember the day that I started to think about plugins almost as a dirty word. We'll get into that kind of conversation as we move forward too. And then I love what you're saying there of like most times, like if it's done right, if you have the right theme, if you're working with the right people that HubSpot CMS so, so I, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask the question. So can non technical users, AKA marketers or other folks, business owners that are just getting started with a small, you know, business and they don't really have a team or maybe can't hire an agency yet can those non technical users easily manage their websites on both of these platforms? And I'm going to and just let you answer the next one too is like which one gets the thumbs up versus maybe the thumbs down on being the better choice potentially.

So yes, yes they can. It is possible for marketers to use both with all of the asterisk on everything that we're saying about how and why, you know, who's building it, how they built it and all of that regarding customization and flexibility. So when we're talking about plugins, that is what makes WordPress crazy customizable. Crazy customizable. You can take WordPress and make it whatever you want it to be with plugins. That's what they're there for. They can give you all the bells and whistles and things that you want to do so that WordPress is considered to be very customizable in that way to expand all those capabilities that way. When we're talking about ease of use and Things we might be talking more about things like themes, which HubSpot has themes. WordPress can have some themes and that can make things easier for people to stay inside a theme. I feel very comfortable in here. Everybody has tied my hands so that I can't screw things up. And that is wonderful. So if that's your route, you might want to run the theme route and not delve into something like a WordPress theme that then needs all of these plugins and customizations to get all that stuff you want. But it depends on what you want, which I know we're going to talk about as well.

If I had to give one my ultimate vote. George, ease of use for someone to jump in, grab a theme out of the marketplace and set your site up without having any type of technical background. HubSpot's got my vote. They make things a hell of a lot easier.

I mean, I don't disagree with you at the end of the day, knowing that if I go with HubSpot, I don't have to worry about hosting. If I go with HubSpot, SSL is automatically there. If I go with HubSpot, I have a support team. We'll talk about that more. Like, there's just some of these fringe items that you have to think about as a business owner or our marketer that are additional cost additional. Like the plugins. There might be costs, they might be free. If they're free, watch out. Again, I'm. The plugin is a dirty word guy, but I'll just kind of play that part for the rest of this interview. I'd like, Mary, that you dove into customization and flexibility. I actually want to kind of keep going down that road a little bit and just get your. You even mentioned Elementor. Right. Which, by the way, when I was doing WordPress websites was one of my favorite builders before that was Beaver Builder. And then there was freaking one other one before that, but I don't remember it. So it doesn't matter. When we're talking about customization and flexibility, talk us through, like, what are the customization capabilities of HubSpot, CMS and WordPress. Because yes, we might want to live in a world where our hands are a little tied, but we also might want to live in a world where our hands are a little tied, but we have some light at the end of the tunnel where we can do some creative, fun stuff. Talk us through that.

Yeah. So starting with WordPress, we know there are thousands and thousands of themes that you can choose from and then you can take that Theme, customize it with those plugins. One thing we haven't talked about with plugins is that. And some are free, some are paid. It's a library, right, of things you can choose from. And unfortunately, even with this, not all of those can be used out of the box exactly the way you want them to, right? So some plugins, you just plug it in and it kind of works. Some might need further customization, which can require further development from your developer. I mean, we build on WordPress, we have sites on WordPress and we have a developer who builds an elementor and we love elementor. And it makes things so easy to have those modular pages, right? We love that about it. Sometimes we have requests for plugins and we still need to customize them, and then it becomes something really unique that has to be maintained. And then when it has to be maintained, sometimes it becomes breaks. And that kind of gets into. George, what you were talking about, about keeping up with all of this, which even though we're like, Yay, WordPress, so customizable, which we love, you have to keep up with all of it and all of those plugins and all of that customization. So that is definitely something to consider with WordPress on that side.

And it all goes into that, that cost topic that we'll get into because WordPress is free. Free air quotes. There's lots of free plugins that you can use, which dirty word. There's things that come along with free plugins that not necessarily paid plugins, but now you're bringing in potentially additional costs to get the level of customization and flexibility. And it's going to require some updates and maintenance to make sure things don't get outdated. All that stuff. I love WordPress for that reason. There's always something out of the box that you can plug in nine times out of ten if you need to, to get what you want. HubSpot's insanely flexible as well. The marketplace has lots of things that you can add in, and in my experience, there's not much that we can't build inside of HubSpot, e commerce aside. And that's something that we can dig into a little bit further. But that is, frankly my experience. We are able to build really cool customized experiences, either building on top of a theme or going straight custom out of the box and still making it modular. They're still making it flexible for someone that doesn't know code. Because my goal in life is no one ever should be touching code on your website. No handcuffs. That's it. And Making sure that you can do everything you need to optimize for your users your experience. So both sides get the best results out of that experience.

Yeah, I love this conversation so much because it is like the no handcuffs or giving them the keys to the kingdom that they actually need to reign. Because your website is now not brochure where it is a customer experience. It is a prospecting playground that you have to just have it be what it needs to be for the folks who are visiting. Here's the thing, what I would also say, what came to mind when I heard both of you talking is if, if you're watching this or listening to this and you've tried HubSpot in the past, you should probably try HubSpot of now. Because the CMS in particular has come a long way from what it was when it first dropped. And when we're talking about things like themes, you might be thinking, well, it was templates. Well, that's all changed and so definitely take another look at it now. Here's the thing, the other thing that when I hear about customization and I hear about both these platforms and I hear about grabbing a theme, one of the, the problems, one of the conundrums in the viewer's brain might be, yeah, but I don't want my website to look like Jimmy's website or Susie's website. So one, how, you know, does these themes, how does HubSpot CMS, how does WordPress actually cater to unique business needs differently? Again, because we're talking about flexibility. So how does it just cater to unique business needs?

So it's interesting that you bring that up about things maybe looking the same. One of the things that we talk to with clients is that when you find something that works, it's okay to do that thing that works. And when it comes to website strategy and when it comes to social media, certain aspects of website strategy, some things just work. And it's okay if everybody does them right. If our navigations all have a button in them, like that's okay. You don't have to worry that everyone else in your industry has a button in the main navigation for your direct call to action. Like that's okay, because if it works, then you should do it too. So there are ways to customize themes so that you're not looking exactly the same as everybody else. And the nice thing about both WordPress and HubSpot, certainly with the way that we build and do theme type things, is that you can have some customization within the theme. So even if you have a theme website and someone else has the same theme, they're not going to look exactly the same because they have your branding, your colors, your icons, whatever you want to have there. And then you can use those modules like Legos to build whatever page you want to tell your right story for your right business. So the theme doesn't just mean exact same website necessarily. You might have the same building blocks, the same modules to use, and then you can use those modules to really tell your story the right way and have the right strategy, your way.

I look at it like a car. Most cars are dang near the same. Right. They've got all the same components, very much the same layouts. I mean, Tesla, maybe some of those are a little weird. But for the most part, the layout is the layout because it works, it's consistent. And the thing that changes is a little bit of the aesthetic and most of the content on the inside. Right. And websites are exactly the same. If you want your site to be unique, don't go to Shutterstock and download every stereotypical Shutterstock image on there to populate your website, your brand, your company is your team and your folks. And that is where whatever layout theme you download, your site will shine if you put the effort into making it. You, your content, your images, your people. Doesn't matter what the design is. It's got to look great, it's got to be clean. But that's where the big results and the customization comes in.

Yeah, I think the big takeaway there, the nugget of wisdom, is if you customize in the direction of you and yours, your team, your products, your services, then you're gonna knock it out the park. Okay, so this is the hard part, though. Like, thumbs up, thumbs down, like, who's kind of the winner? When you think about customization and flexibility between HubSpot, CMS and WordPress.

Mary, I'm curious for yours first. So you go.

So if we're talking about all the possibilities, then I might give it to WordPress. Just because you have the ability to do so much, and in that way, HubSpot is maybe a little. There's a little less possible that way. But having all of that customization, it's kind of a blessing and a curse. With great power comes great responsibility. Right? Do you need all of that and everything that comes with it? I would ask you, but, yeah, WordPress, in terms of what's possible, that probably gets my vote.

I would say from a customization standpoint, WordPress wins. I actually, George, I'm going To break the rules and break them up. Flexibility, I think HubSpot, when I think of flexibility, I think ease of changing anything that I want in my experience. And while you have in WordPress the customization ability, that's not a word we'll run with it of whatever plugin you want. The flexibility is not always there because now we have to look at the dirty word plugin and the potential inflexibility of some of those plugins. Customization, WordPress for sure. Flexibility. HubSpot's got my heart.

I love that Vin and Vin, hey, rules are made to be broken, brother. So if you want to split things apart apart as we move forward, feel free. And also Mary, by the way, we'll give you some street cred points for a Spider man quote inside of a Sidekick Strategies interview. I'm just gonna throw that out there. But ladies and gentlemen, let's keep moving along because this is for you to help you make the right decision. When we go into the category of integration and compatibility, how well do HubSpot, CMS and WordPress integrate with other tools and systems? Just unpack your brain and walk us through that.

On the WordPress side, we've talked about it a little bit because with integrations that usually means plugins, right? So you've heard us pretty much ad nauseam talk about what that means and everything that comes with it. We haven't talked as much about it on the HubSpot side. So HubSpot has an app marketplace, right? And they have things from Google search console to SEMrush. Whatever your needs are for you, there are thousands of apps that you can potentially integrate with HubSpot, so you have those options for integration as well. They're not necessarily one to one type of integrations, right? So an integration via a plugin in WordPress is not going to be the same as the HubSpot integration with that same thing. So you can't necessarily say, oh I see one in both platforms, they're going to be exactly the same and give me the same thing. So I never said that. That's not what that means. Look it up and see what you get with each integration. But in terms of possibilities, you do have a lot of possibilities for, for what you can integrate. It's just different in how you do it. The plugin versus that hookup in HubSpot with their type of integrations.

The app marketplace for HubSpot has a lot in there, from CRM integrations to automation. Whatever you need there, in my experience, has been an app in there or if not, there's other tools. And this goes for WordPress as well, like a zapier or custom integrations to accomplish what you need need. There's still homegrown CRMs and CM and things out there that need custom integrations. Right? So both have that ability to make those things happen. It's just how much we need to do WordPress because of the history and time. There are a ton of plugins integrations out there. Good, bad in between. George, to what you said earlier, the HubSpot of old didn't have a lot of integrations out of the box. The app marketplace was not a thing way back when. So if you're still sitting out there like my stuff didn't integrate with HubSpot, I still can't look at it. Go look again friends, because there is a lot more out there and there are a lot more companies that are going HubSpot inherent for their integrations, which brings in a slew of awesome capabilities and functionality in there as well.

And that was their stated goal, right? At one time HubSpot said we want to be able to connect to everything and anything. They declared it, they said said it and over the years have made that push to really make it true.

Awesome. So it's funny because my brain is going in a couple different places here after hearing you guys talk about this. And it's like when we're saying integration and we're pairing it with the word WordPress, we're almost going into the plugins and the things that you can do on platform in WordPress when we're saying HubSpot, CMS and the marketplace, actually what integrations is, is something almost completely different where it's actually connecting to other tools that you might be using. By the way, an integration with HubSpot is the WordPress integration. What? Wait, huh? Yeah, it is, right? And so if you think about business in general instead of just the website portion of this, now all sudden you realize like there's a different relationship that HubSpot proper, by the way, WordPress is not built on a CRM. HubSpot CMS is built on a CRM that, that is different. So with that thinking, and again, you can go the WordPress side or you can go the HubSpot CMS side. People are hearing this word integration. Can you maybe give us some examples that you've seen over the last 12, eight years of like essential integrations that businesses should be thinking about pertaining to prospects, customers, website experience, those types of things?

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned a huge one for WordPress. Right. Is having some kind of CRM integration. Right. It's not built on one, so you've got to add one and there, there are easy ways to make sure it's hooked up to do that for HubSpot because. And it doesn't mean people don't hook HubSpot CMS up to different CRMs. I see that all the time. We're not going to talk about that today because I'm going to start ranting. But you can connect HubSpot to other CRMs. Certainly. Either way, you want to make sure your data is flowing all the way from marketing to sales. Right. You got to close the loop. So that is of course for any business owner leader you've got to make sure you've got some kind of CRM closed loop reporting happening from your CMS CRM, all of that. But there are a lot of other fun type of integrations that you can do to just get better data or get better whatever you're interested in. There's a Lucky Orange integration that you can do with HubSpot for example. So I can see all of the things that people are doing on the website attached to their contact record, which is so creepy and cool. But that's one of the ones that when we want to empower marketers to get more from what they're doing, those types of things are really fun and pretty cool to do.

Yeah. The behavioral data integrations hotjar Lucky Orange vwo we your flavor of choice, super powerful WordPress or HubSpot having those integrated so that you're getting the best data from your users. Those are typical ones that we see time and time again. Marketo with WordPress frequent right. Most folks, if you're not in HubSpot, you're likely building your site in HubSpot if you're going to be on the CRM and the marketing engine. Some folks don't like Mary said. But if you're in WordPress you need that integration so all the stuff gets collected somewhere. It's just your website. There's nothing else packed powering it unless you have created that integration and that connection. So those are really the two big ones that we spend the most time around with our clients. George is what's the CRM and the housing pen for all of our data and how do we actually look at our users so we know we have the right data for you?

So good. So good. So with this idea of integration and compatibility. Thumbs up, thumbs down, winner, loser or maybe a tie like where do we go where your mind's at with WordPress versus HubSpot CMS.

Vin knows me, I love to split hairs, I love to argue semantics and make everything complicated. But there is a lot possible. There's a lot possible, but it's the same thing that we were talking about in general with WordPress before that. There's just a lot that comes with doing plugins for integrations for things, a lot to keep up with versus using the app marketplace and doing that type of thing with HubSpot. So there is a I want to give an edge to WordPress in terms of what's possible, possible. But again, getting back to flexibility, ease of use, leaning HubSpot.

I give it to HubSpot and here's why. While you don't have all of the things up To Mary's point, HubSpot has made a really strong effort and we've seen it, to get those integrations in that app marketplace and to make sure that companies are thinking them first. So as we look at integration and compatibility, are there areas where you may need something a little more custom? Yes, it is still possible inside of HubSpot and the power that that gives you, from what I have seen, helps companies crush their goals when it's all powered in one spot. So it used to be a downside of HubSpot. Frankly a year ago I probably would have given it full swing to WordPress, but there's been so much movement there. HubSpot takes it for me in this one.

Yeah, it's interesting too because there's a side tangent of this conversation that we could be having around customization, flexibility, integration, all of that. And that is sometimes on the WordPress site you're going for a plugin and on the HubSpot CMS side it's already a built in feature. For instance, you might need something for analytics that goes Deeper. Plugin on WordPress side and there's a reporting engine on your HubSpot CMS side. You might need something to do like you know, monster pop ups or whatever it is where you're like doing banner drop downs and slide ins feature in HubSpot CMS. So there's this kind of like what plays well here or there. Speaking of what plays well here or there, two things if you have a website and if you're a business owner or a marketer you're probably paying attention to is SEO, search engine optimization and having the marketing tools that you need. So Mary and Vin, when we think about that category that we're moving into, what built In. I shouldn't say built in because I know we're going to run into plugins, but I'm going to ask it this way anyway. What built in SEO and marketing tools do each of these platforms have? Let's just start there with SEO built in SEO marketing tools. Each platform, sure.

So built in WordPress does allow you to make sure you're optimizing things like your titles and meta descriptions for things like that. I'm going to tell you now for the first time, I'll give you my vote already. I'm going to give this one to HubSpot. Absolutely. Giving this one to HubSpot. Just coming clean, throwing it out there before I say anything else. Because HubSpot is a marketing engine. It's an incredible marketing engine. The SEO tools that they've built in within the last couple of years are insane sane. There's an actual SEO tool that will look technical SEO and on page SEO give you a breakdown of number of items you should be looking at and how to fix it. And here I'll open the editor for you so you can go in there and edit it right here on the page. If you are not using the SEO tool in HubSpot, I'm telling you to do it right now. First of all, it's an incredible tool. So this, they take the cake for me. Absolutely. I will say with WordPress, of course, Yoast SEO, great tool. Really, really great tool. If you don't have it, it's a great one. It allows you to add things like schema, which is huge for SEO relatively simply, which is awesome. I know WordPress power users who love Yoast SEO and love that they have that ability to bulk add schema to things. So that's really huge. You can do it. But HubSpot's out of the box tools, way better.

That's it, y'. All. It's built into HubSpot. It's not out of the box with WordPress. So Yoast, if you are on WordPress, bread and butter, that's table stakes for making sure your SEO game's on par. And then we usually augment with integrating it with Semrush as well. So making sure that we can track and monitor with an outside tool. More cost, but more tool. Right? So HubSpot's SEO tool has a lot of stuff similarities with Semrush and it pulls in a heck of a lot of data. So you're saving some cost and you have efficiencies because it's all where your site would potentially be hosted. Right. So Mary's right. It takes the cake for me on the SEO front.

Can we snip that the. Mary's right. Yeah, let's snip that.

I was gonna double click on it as well, but before I do that, ladies and gentlemen, if you're watching this and you heard the word schema and you're like, google it and then go figure that out. Second of all, that lets you know that we truly do have three nerds in the room that love what we're talking about. And I do double click on Mary, especially if you do the Google search console integration with your Word or with your HubSpot CMS. Now you have the SEO recommendations tool, the SEO topics tool, and you've got SEO optimize in your landing page websites and blog articles waiting for you to make it the best that it can be. So it's amazing. Now let's tie a nice little bow on this. We're talking about the SEO, the marketing tools. I'm a business owner or I'm a marketer beginning this journey. How do these features help the business itself grow online? Like, how important is that?

We talk about this a lot, George, a lot. Because some business owners have a website and they just think, yay, I have a website. That's enough. And it's not. It's not enough. If you do not understand the performance of your website, you are wasting money. You're wasting an incredibly valuable resource. It should be your very best sales tool, your very best salesperson that works 247 around the clock, never takes holidays. But so many people don't understand the performance of their site and they're not using these tools to do that. That's what these are for. So we don't have to launch a website and go, I hope it works. Please give me leads. We can actually understand the health and performance of our website. Is it actually loading properly? Are we creating a good experience? Are we getting good traffic? How are they converting? What's the behavioral data? How are people actually using the site? This is table stakes now. You've got to be doing this stuff. You have to be using these tools or like I said, you're lighting your money on fire.

It's another plus one for HubSpot Gang because you got to augment, add on, plug in your way to reporting success with WordPress. It's not out of the box and the amount of layers to add onto it. You can accomplish great things. You can get all the data, you can create all the reports, you can leverage GA4 in wild, wacky ways, right? But it's all table stakes in HubSpot. It's all through that marketing engine and the reporting engine. So you can see my organic traffic source is only converting at 1.3%. We need to get that to 5% so we can actually be doing the stuff we need to do. Let's go run some AB test because that's built into HubSpot based on your level as well. Like those are things that if you don't have the data, you're never going to be able to improve for your users, which means you're never going to be able to improve for your business. Don't light money on fire.

The gold nugget there for everybody is it's just dumb to light money on fire. Also if in that portion you're like GA4 what? Well, Google that as well. And if you realize that you don't even have Google Universal, which now, by the way, you're probably watching this and is dead, just call one of us. We're here to help. Okay, let's move forward and let's talk about cost and value. Now I'm going to ask this question, but Vin and Mary, I'm going to put a precursor because I know that we could probably do an entire episode on HubSpot pricing. So we're only talking about HubSpot CMS, so that narrows it down a little bit. But when you think about a HubSpot CMS and WordPress, like can you break down the cost structures? Because you know, WordPress is free of HubSpot CMS and WordPress. And by the way, I jest on that free word, but I'll let you guys take it from there.

You mentioned earlier hosting, so this is one of the costs that's in the fine print here. So WordPress free, but your site has to be hosted and you have to pay for hosting. Hosting doesn't have to be exorbitantly expensive. It might be, you know, $9.99 a month depending on where you host. But depending on your site, your needs, your business, it could be more like a thousand dollars a month. That's one of the, I don't want to say hidden. I mean it's just a cost of WordPress. We all know about it. So you have to pay for hosting. Not really free HubSpot. You get hosting and you get great hosting. So that is something you just don't have to worry about. And for some business owners who don't have maybe don't even know what Hosting means maybe you weren't worried about it anyway. But we know people who build the websites and work on the websites. You gotta. So it's an important thing to factor into cost.

Hosting's the big thing that I always end up talking about plugins. The more plugins that you have to get the features and functionality, you're gonna pay for a chunk of those. And just like your Netflix, Disney Plus, ESPN plus, all the subscriptions, it stacks up, gang. So your $9.99 hosting cost for WordPress in your install could immediately be $300 once you add in the top level plugins that you might want need desire for your functionality. Not really free. It does depend on your website out your tech stack. But like we said, if you want behavioral data, if you want the right reporting, you're gonna shell some money out at a certain point to do the right thing. So you're not lighting your investment on fire. It's all table stakes in HubSpot. So depending on your level of HubSpot, there's a free CMS version, limited amount of pages all the way up to enterprise, which is 1200 base price a month, and you get all access and things in different features. Right. And everywhere in between. Most folks for us are on CMS Pro gives us database functionality, and that out of the box I believe is 400amonth. That's your SSL certificate that you pay for with WordPress. That's your hosting, that's security, that's maintenance, that's updates, all content staging. That's the ability to do all these things that you're probably going to either pay an agency or someone to do, or you're going to have all these disparate costs for your WordPress site. It ends up being roughly apples to apples when you look at price across both. HubSpot just gives bigger bang for the buck in my experience.

Yeah, and the funny thing about this one is we're actually not even really talking about content staging. We're not talking about the ability to do private content or membership websites. We're not even talking about how if you did go with enterprise, you could host multiple websites in the same portal. You have to think about those different factors as you're thinking about cost. But I really want to dive into one of the most loose words that we could actually focus on in this interview, and that's the word value, because it just really depends. But in your case, when we use the word value, what value does each of these platforms, HubSpot, CMS and WordPress, provide to the users for its cost. Like is there things that immediately stand out? Like, well, okay, these are the value ads over here and these are the definite value ads over here.

It's going to be so simple. But because we're talking about websites that marketers want to use and can use, having a marketing engine behind your website and even what's on CMS Pro, what is offered there regarding landing pages and things like that, it's huge. There's a ton of value on that. There's a ton of value being on a CMS that was built by people who cared about marketing and specifically wanted you to be able to get data out of the box and wanted you to be able to have, you know, that kind of functionality out of the box. So HubSpot has a ton of inherent value in some of that basic stuff because they're not just trying to be like a content management stuff system, they're a content management system with some marketing capability to it.

Long term value for the effort to put in it goes to HubSpot. You can get the ecosystem set up really quickly and efficiently without having to do a ton of research and augment your WordPress website. Again, caveats, E commerce and business needs aside, the ability to have all of your plate things in one place, one pen to rule them all. If you have multiple websites upgrading to enterprise so you have it all in one stop shop, the value and the long term rewards there, they outweigh everything in my opinion. You can be so efficient just because the CMS has those ties built in. With that thought from HubSpot, it's not. I have a Dodge car and I'm gonna go get the Ford guys to build on top of it. That's your plugins, y'. All. It's not the same purpose person that built the website. You're just bolting on aftermarket parts. HubSpot doesn't have all of that right. It's all built in with some of those core pieces that you need for the vehicle to actually go.

Love it. Note to self, VIN loves car analogies. I think that might be the second or third one that we've gotten during this interview. I think I know the answer, but I have to ask. HubSpot CMS vs WordPress Thumbs up, thumbs down tie. Like just give us our synopsis on that again. I think we know, but let's just set it for reality here.

Definitive HubSpot thumbs up.

HubSpot thumbs up. It's gonna win.

All right. All right, let's dive into another section here. Boy, this one right here, I'll tell you, Security and reliability, that's the section that we're moving into. So when we think about HubSpot, CMS and WordPress, and we're in the terms of security and reliability, where does your brain go on those two platforms?

I'm going to keep mine short because I know VIN is just going to go off on this, but what I will say, the core of WordPress is secure. WordPress at its core, on its own is secure. When you add to it, that's when stuff gets crazy and not as secure. And VIN will talk about that. HubSpot, extremely secure. HubSpot we don't worry about in the same way. And then tell them why that dirty.

Word of plugin, this is where we unpack that, y'. All. So again, your aftermarket parts that you're bolting on, not built by the same developer that built your core, they're not worried about the same thing. So as soon as a plugin becomes outdated in WordPress vulnerability, that someone could attack pros and cons, you can have access to all the plugins in the world and some of those are going to be vulnerable. So that goes into your maintenance, your upkeep, and making sure that your website is actually secure. I have never, and I'm going to knock on all things wood, had a HubSpot website hacked in all of my experience. Zero malware, not the case on WordPress. We lock our stuff down, gang. And that goes into why you need a secure hosting environment. More cost on WordPress, HubSpot out of the box because it is a closed environment. Not everyone and their sister can build a plugin for HubSpot. You got to know some stuff. It's more secure because of that. It is more reliable because of that. And I will be the first to say HubSpot has had downtime in the past. There have been some big ones over the years, none in recent time that I can remember. Some folks that I talk to still remember some of them. So I bring that up, that's a thing. But it is a heck of a lot more reliable than your average WordPress site, where any host can go down at any time. WP engine, love them to death, they have downtime every now and then. Manage wp, insert your flavor of choice, they're going to have some ups and downs. HubSpot in my experience has been super reliable, very consistent and secure as all.

Heck, yeah, I love this. And I, I just know, I'm going to say for you, two thumbs up for security when it comes to HubSpot. I mean, ladies and gentlemen, if you don't want to believe us, just go to HubSpot.com forward/security. Yeah, that is a URL. Yes, it works. Yes. You'll read all of it if you really care about it and then go from there. Let's dig into what might be our last section for this interview and again, we might have to come back and have another HubSpot WordPress conversation in the future. We'll see. Maybe there's a lot of different directions that my brain went into that we opened up as we started with this and things that you said. But let's talk about support because I mean WordPress support, it has to be awesome. They probably have an entire team for us and maybe HubSpot does, I don't know. But what kind of support and community resources are available for HubSpot CMS versus maybe what kind of support do you have over for WordPress in your website if you build on that?

One of the first things I think of when I think of HubSpot is HubSpot Academy and the huge library, huge library of resources that they have built to provide readily available information for its users. I mean there are courses, there's an astounding number of courses. There are knowledge base articles. We send each other knowledge base articles when we're annoyed by being asked a question. It's like, hey idiot on my team, like here's a knowledge base article. Go read that if anything happens. Because it's good, it's all there. Like find me something that's not in a knowledge base article. So that is tremendous and a great asset. And WordPress doesn't have an academy with courses like that. That's just where I'm gonna leave that.

There's plenty of forums for WordPress. YouTube is your friend. There's no dedicated WordPress WordPress like.com support team, right? So with HubSpot you've got 24 hour support, they've got full all day and night that will be able to assist you if you have an issue. And if you have an issue with WordPress you're probably going back to the person, agency, people that built your website and saying, hey, I need your help. Whereas with HubSpot you can do that as well. You can go to the folks that built your website and say, hey, I need your help. Or you can call up HubSpot support and they may be able to help you. They may send you back to the people that built your site. But you have that person to actually assist you. There's also a really strong, dedicated community both around developers and marketers and sales folks inside of HubSpot that are all assisting folks in getting the most out of the tool and making sure that things are going really, really well. On the WordPress side, because you have plugins, it may be that you need to reach out to the plugin developer if you have an issue with your plugin. So you have more folks and those folks never ever have a support team. George, you know that frustration dearly. Like those people you can't get in touch with. So if your plugins got a problem, you're up the creek without the paddle, unfortunately.

All right, actually, okay, I said that was the last question. I lied. I've got two more. I just can't stop. I want to add value to the people who are listening or viewing this. So let's dive into performance and scalability. How do these platforms perform under high traffic? Because that's the thing. I'm starting a business or I have a business. I build my website because I want to get all the eyeballs. I want to get all the possibilities to close those sales because I want to get all the, well, maybe not all the revenue, but some of the revenue so I can be a profitable business. That means it's going to be high traffic. WordPress, HubSpot, CMS, where does your brain go?

So HubSpot is extremely scalable. I will say that it's extremely scalable and I can say that because I have had clients who have started with very little to nothing and HubSpot was their beginning. Right, Their, their website. They got on HubSpot and they found it able to grow with them pretty easily. When they started their content marketing engine and really started writing all of those great articles that answered the questions that their users had and they started getting all this organic traffic and they found that the site could perform, could scale. Yeah, maybe we had to come back and say we need to build new things, we need to build new landing pages, we need to build new pages. We need to do that. And it was very easy to do so because of that marketing engine that's within HubSpot and making it fairly simple to clone things and do all of that. So I have seen HubSpot scale very well with growth of traffic. I've also seen WordPress be able to scale. What can happen though, that I've seen happen on WordPress? I've got another thing for you to Google. There's something called post types. You sometimes need to pick certain post types for your website that your website needs and then you want to grow and then you need different post types or you have to change your post types and things can get kind of awkward and they don't scale as well because you have to go back and you have to change things. So in that way, I have seen things be a little less graceful in terms of scalability.

I think graceful is the apt word. WordPress for me can be clunky for your scalability depending on how it was set up. Assuming you're set up really well, both have high performance potential. High scalability potential. WordPress. I'm going to go back to something we already talked about. You got to look at your host. How much traffic can your host handle? Are you gonna get throttled? We had a site on WordPress year, I'm talking 10 years ago, they had the Black Friday spike and we thought we gave them enough threshold in their host. The host told us they gave enough threshold. They didn't. They got throttled on Black Friday and it was miserable. I have never encountered that in HubSpot ever. It's not a thing that we worry about. And we have sites that are getting 800,000 sessions a month in HubSpot. There's no throttle conversation needed from can we handle this bandwidth? It just happens. And some of those folks start with 2, 3, 5,000 sessions a month and you can ramp all the way up to wherever you need to go. And if you need to add on more pieces to your puzzle, you can scale inside of the CMS like we said. You can go up to Enterprise if you really need to on the CMS hub by itself and bring in more, more high level functionality so you can grow this thing through the roof. You can do it with WordPress as well. It just might be a little bit clunky and not so graceful.

I love that so much. And there's a couple things I'm going to ask. The question, by the way, other than traffic, the word scalability, where does your mind go if there's something else that you want to dip into? But there's a theme that hit me. I'm like, man, we keep hearing this, we keep hearing this. And I should have probably had a section, although it's been part of almost every section. And the word that keeps coming to my mind is like simplification, a simplified way, an easier way. You might not have to google that junk way that we've said. You google that like in a couple scenarios, right? And so think about that when you're making this decision. HubSpot CMS versus the WordPress for your website is like how simple do you want the process to be, what kind of support you want along the way? Is there any other pieces that when we say scalability for the business and the website that your brain goes to?

For me specifically, and I mentioned it earlier, it's E commerce, right? So HubSpot does have the ability, depending on the Hubs, that you have to take payments for digital stuff. There is no e commerce engine current state. And if you're at HubSpot, listen, we want this, y', all, everyone wants this. There's no real e commerce engine for HubSpot. So if you want to ship products out, you're not going to do that. You're going to look at either a Shopify which directly integrates with HubSpot. Heck yeah. Or we leverage WordPress WooCommerce for a Shopify for a store motion if you need the E commerce. And again we integrate that back into HubSpot. There are times where it makes the most sense to build the E commerce engine just in WordPress and have some of the site around that as well. If E commerce is something that you were thinking about from a scalability standpoint, we still have not hit issues with HubSpot. We just bring in a engine just for E commerce. So you get the best of that world and the best of the HubSpot world. But depending on your situation, you may want to entertain WordPress for a big, big E commerce focused motion.

I need you to do me a favor, Vin Mary. I need you to get your crystal ball out because I wanna, I wanna do the future outlook, the looking into the future, if you will. And I'm basically gonna ask three questions in one so you can unpack it however you want and then we'll let the viewers and listeners get back to their regular scheduled day. So when we get our crystal ball out and we think about the future, where do you see HubSpot CMS going? Where do you see WordPress going? And are there things that business owners or marketers should be thinking about or preparing based on the changes that you might see?

What are your thoughts starting with HubSpot? We've talked about HubSpot wanting to be this, this foundation in this platform on which you can grow everything you need from. And I think they're going to continue to do that where everything that you want to do as a marketer will become part of that package. Right? Whether it's self service tools and quizzes and adding things like that and adding event registrations, things like that, making that really easy. E commerce will have to be a part of it. It's going to be a part of it so that you can get those things as part of your HubSpot CMS and build it to truly be that thing that you can do everything from. With WordPress it's different. We've talked about it sometimes being a Frankensite and I think that WordPress you will be able to bolt things onto it still because their focus is more smoothing out the core of what they have, right? WordPress itself as its core. They will work on it, it will be smoother and it will be, you know, no bugs and they'll continue to make that right, really good at what they do and really stay in the lane of what they do. And blogging will really be, you know, their huge thing and that will continue to smooth out and you'll just have to bolt things onto it. Whereas HubSpot will focus on having the bolts be part of the monster. Is that. I don't know if that makes sense.

We've gone all over today with analogies. I'm here for it. So I, I think what Mary said holds true. WordPress in, in my opinion is going to focus on optimizing that core. So what we have seen them roll out with Gutenberg and making that update and for the non technical folks, it's just the core framework for drag and drop that they have finally improved. And I say finally because it's been a hell of a long time where HubSpot has been doing it for quite some time. So WordPress is catching on that people want easy stuff. They don't want necessarily all of the bolts, they just want some of them. By the time time WordPress makes that up, in my opinion, HubSpot's already going to be on to the next thing and the next thing being AI, right? So there's all the AI plugins and add ons for WordPress. HubSpot's building it in inherently the bolts are already on the beast and that AI piece is going to make your website so much more effective just having it in that ecosystem and that is what excites me. That's a whole separate episode that we could dig into. But that future state of having the inherent AI and your HubSpot website talking to each other, the sky's the limit for what that can do for our results and what it helps our users do on the front end. So crystal ball. I think HubSpot only continues to double down on ease of use and making it super duper simple for the marketer and the business owner to see how their site and their content is performing. And that's. That's table stakes in this day and age. So we're not burning money. WordPress is trying to make that up. I just think they're a little bit too late at this point because folks have done it really flipping well for the last five to six years and are only going to improve from that.

So how about that? Tons of information for you to choose the right cms, which CMS for you will prevail. That's the only question that I'm left with now. In between now and the next Sidekick Strategy Expert interview event, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and we'll see you in the next event.