Which HubSpot CMS Tier is Right for Your Needs

In our recent discussion on how to choose the right CMS for your website, we listed some crucial questions to consider when selecting the right content management system for your needs. And while identifying the right CMS for your website is an important step in building your site, it’s actually just the beginning due to the different tiers of services and features many of today’s top CMS platforms offer. 

HubSpot’s CMS Hub— which is one of our preferred platforms for helping our clients develop or redesign their websites — is a cloud-based CMS that enables your entire team to create and optimize website content with ease. 

With drag-and-drop content editing, a wide variety of themes, intuitive reporting dashboards, and a strong emphasis on SEO and organic search value, HubSpot’s CMS gives marketers and business owners a robust toolkit for developing and maintaining a dynamic, user-friendly digital home.  

Plus, the HubSpot CMS is fully integrated with the HubSpot customer relationship management (CRM) system, which creates a powerful marketing and sales enablement solution under one transparent umbrella. 

With all that the HubSpot CMS has to offer, the task is knowing which of the three service and features tiers is right for what you want to achieve with your website, so let’s briefly break down the HubSpot tiers to help you select the one that best suits your needs.

HubSpot CMS Hub Starter

The HubSpot CMS Starter tier is ideal for small or even mid-level businesses that are looking to develop a website quickly and with a budget-conscious mindset. The Starter tier will help you develop and launch your website quickly and securely, and the content creation, editing, managing tools make it easy to update your website content without the need for much prior experience or expertise. 

When it comes to the basics of operating a protected, easy to navigate website, HubSpot CMS starter provides the nuts and bolts of web development, including: 

• Firewall and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to help ensure your data is safe, remains encrypted, and is not unwillingly or improperly accessed or distributed. 
• Permission, user, and activity logging for complete transparency about who is creating, editing, and distributing website content, and when it is happening.
• Single-solution web hosting to build, house, and manage all the files necessary for your website within the CMS itself. 

Plus, HubSpot CMS Starter offers basic  dashboards so you can evaluate how your website is performing in real-time, and the CMS Starter tiers also give you access to a variety of HubSpot’s free marketing tools such as contact or request-a-quote forms, email marketing, ad management, and several other tools to help you supplement and optimize your website and web content. 

The CMS Starter package also makes it easy to create, edit, and publish content using a WYSIWYG content editor that’s fully integrated with drag-and-drop capability for things like images, videos, CTAs, SEO tools, and more. 

HubSpot CMS Hub Professional

HubSpot CMS Professional provides everything included in the CMS Starter package, but with a greater emphasis on performance metrics, analytics, and reporting, both in terms of your website as a whole and component pieces like specific pages, forms, CTAs, and more. 

CMS Professional also has tools to help you create more personalized, data-driven content based on who is visiting your website, how they’re interacting with your site’s content, the quality of leads you’re getting, and more. Plus, CMS Professional easily integrates with social media messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp with the added bonus of using chatbot workflows to provide instantaneous replies from your contacts and followers. 

As such, HubSpot CMS Professional is well-suited for midsize or even large-scale businesses that want to prioritize enhancing and customizing the user experience.

Some valuable features and capabilities of the HubSpot CMS Professional tier include: 

• Dynamic, customized website content via HubSpot’s Smart Content tool that uses data from your CRM (name, company, lifecycle stage, purchase history, and more) to personalize the user experience. 
• A/B testing for landing pages, website pages, and other pieces of content to help you better understand how your content is performing and the kind of messaging your target audience is responding to.
• Content staging to help you securely build and test new website pages — or even an entirely new website — without interfering with existing website content or functionality. 
• SEO recommendations to help identify issues and optimization opportunities to drive more organic traffic. Plus, the CMS Professional tier can also integrate with Google Search Console to give you more detailed organic search reporting right in your HubSpot reporting dashboard. 

HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise

Designed for large companies that require more complicated or custom technical solutions, HubSpot CMS Enterprise provides all the same tools and features as the previous two tiers with the ability to handle and easily manage a hierarchy of users, permissions, multiple domains, custom apps and integrations, and more. Plus, to further help large-scale businesses maximize the performance and user experience of their website, the CMS Enterprise tier also offers: 

• Custom objects to help you store almost any type of data in HubSpot, including subscriptions, locations, shipments, events, and more.
• Memberships so that parts of your website can require a username and password to access.
• Automated A/B tests that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you build effective messaging that helps improve metrics like conversion rates. 
• The ability to manage individual permissions for all content — blog posts, website pages, emails, forms, CTAs, and workflows —  based on defined roles or the requirements of individual campaigns.

No matter the size, scope, or scale of your business, HubSpot’s CMS platform offers options to help you develop your ideal website so that you can communicate with your customers and attract new leads organically.

Still have questions about which tier is best for your needs? Tell us about your website project and we’ll make a recommendation, or try our new HubSpot ROI calculator to see if HubSpot is right for you.