HubSpot CMS vs WordPress: Total cost of ownership over 3 years

If you’re close to choosing your website platform, you’re likely debating HubSpot CMS and WordPress. You’re also probably asking which CMS is cheaper, but what you should be questioning is which CMS gives you the lowest total cost of ownership over the next three years, including risk, internal time, and cost of delay.

WordPress can look cheaper on paper, as the software is open-source. However, most teams today aren’t paying for software; they’re paying for ownership, security, hosting, plugins, maintenance, and the developer time needed to keep things running and evolving.

This blog compares HubSpot CMS (now known as HubSpot Content Hub) and WordPress on a three-year, like-for-like basis to help you make a decision based on total cost, not just the sticker price.

HubSpot Content Hub vs WordPress. What’s the verdict?

If you’re a scale-up or enterprise with multiple stakeholders involved, you make regular website changes, and HubSpot is a big part of your revenue engine, then HubSpot CMS/Content Hub is the right choice for you.

It’s usually the lower-risk, more predictable option over three years, as it consolidates hosting and security responsibilities, reduces maintenance overhead, and eliminates day-to-day developer dependencies.

But if you’re running a small, stable website and your priority is the lowest upfront website build cost, then WordPress can make sense. This is especially the case if you have an internal team that already owns security, maintenance, and ongoing developer capacity.

If you’re still struggling, this is the right maturity test to follow:

• If your website is a key revenue channel that changes often, then the total cost of ownership matters more than the sticker price
• If your website is static with minimal activity or changes, and isn’t a revenue driver, then the upfront cost could be the deciding factor

What’s included? And what’s bolted on?

With WordPress, open-source software isn’t the same thing as open-source ownership. With all the add-ons needed, organisations end up unintentionally creating a Frankenstein’s monster that’s difficult to manage and expensive to maintain.

A three-year total cost comparison

The table below shows five key ways HubSpot CMS/Content Hub helps you save money over the typical three-year lifespan of your website. Remember, you aren’t paying for security costs, there’s reduced need for extra development, you don’t need to pay for plugin subscriptions, you get free hosting, and there are no maintenance requirements.

These are typical cost ranges you’re likely to see in the market. Not promises and not universal, plus things can change regularly. These can vary depending on your needs.

Yes, WordPress can be cheap to buy, but also expensive to operate, because:

• Unplanned work can happen when you least expect it. Incident response, broken updates, and urgent developer tickets are all common scenarios
• Costs are spread across vendors and budgets
• Security, updates, fixes, plugin conflicts — every responsibility sits with your team

While the sticker price may seem higher upfront, HubSpot is typically more predictable because more of the operational burden is built into the platform.

When is WordPress the right choice?

WordPress isn’t a bad choice. It’s just a different operating model than HubSpot CMS/Content Hub. WordPress can be the right choice when:

• You run editorial-heavy publishing with super-complex publishing workflows
• You have no CRM dependency
• You aren’t using HubSpot as a connected platform
• You’re only making a cost-only decision
• You have a team prepared to own security and maintenance

Operational cost and time savings

Time is money, and outside of ongoing costs, HubSpot’s no-code solution can be a big time saver. For instance, once the drag and drop functionality is custom-designed and developed, your teams can seamlessly:

• Create new website pages
• Create landing pages
• Edit existing paes
• Carry out A/B tests natively

With AI tools like Breeze to help craft content, all of this can be done without any coding or design knowledge. That means HubSpot CMS/Content Hub users benefit from:

• Time savings
• Cost savings as there are no heavy development fees
• Faster to launch new products and services
• There’s reduced friction in marketing
• Revenue is improved

Every day work where the costs show up

Making page changes

• WordPress: Marketing usually waits on developers or risks breaking something

   

• HubSpot: Once the website is built with the right components, teams can safely edit and publish with less developer dependency

Campaign launches

• WordPress: Additional QA, plugin interactions, and deployment cycles can massively slow down launches

   

• HubSpot: Faster page creation and iteration reduces the cost of delays

Running A/B tests

• WordPress: Typically bolted on through plugins or external tools

• HubSpot: Testing is native and marketer-friendly with less setup and less friction

Fixing issues

• WordPress: Responsibility, diagnoses, and fixes lie with your team or agency

• HubSpot: There are fewer moving parts, so fewer things need fixing. If something does break, HubSpot is on it

Opportunity cost and the costs you don’t see

When crunch time approaches and you need to select a platform, the choice is usually driven by risk and opportunity, not features. Here are the opportunity costs we see repeatedly.

Slower experimentation

If it takes you weeks to make changes on your website, you’ll naturally run fewer tests. That means slower conversions, slower learning, and slower revenue impact.

Disconnected CRM and CMS

When your website and CRM don’t link effectively, the cost shows up as:

• Tracking inconsistencies
• Less reliable personalisation
• Reporting gaps
• Awkward handoffs between the two systems

Missed personalisation and conversion gains

If your CMS makes it challenging to use CRM data in the website experience, you end up with:

• Generic experiences
• Lower impact from lifecycle marketing
• Slow iteration on conversion paths

Can you bolt HubSpot onto WordPress?

Short answer: yes.

However, bolt-on models typically fail over time for several reasons.

• Data consistency: You can end up with multiple sources of truth, patchy attribution, and inconsistent implementation of tracking across plugins and templates

• Long-term complexity: More vendors. More dependencies. More maintenance paths. All of this can create more failure points, more time wasted on coordinating fixes, and more hidden work that doesn’t necessarily show up as project spend, but still costs you

• Several breaking points: Plugin conflicts after updates, security patching responsibility, performance getting worse over time, and inconsistent reporting across systems. One of these tends to break first, and the rest follow

If HubSpot is central to your RevOps management, the native approach is simpler to operate and easier to govern.

If you’re still undecided between HubSpot CMS/Content Hub and WordPress, the fairest comparison is one that includes everything. Platform, maintenance, security, ongoing development, and the internal cost of waiting to make key changes. That’s what the total cost of ownership looks like in reality.