On the 3rd of August 2021, HubSpot launched CMS Hub Starter to help small and growing businesses leverage its all-in-one CRM solution alongside their website. Let's run through the features below including which license is best for your needs.
The CRM-Powered CMS, starting at just $25/mo, is the new kid on the block in the Global CMS space, standing up tall against traditional CMS platforms such as WordPress and Joomla. HubSpot’s Starter CMS provides a solution that greatly outpaces traditional CMS platforms in terms of cost and quality.
Before this announcement, HubSpot had both "professional" and "enterprise" CMS options ranging from $400/month to $1,200/month. CMS Hub Starter means businesses can now purchase an affordable CMS with an in-built CRM, 24/7 security monitoring, 99.9% uptime, and a tonne more included (see below).
With this new release here to shake things up, we’ll analyse the three different HubSpot CMS licenses below - Starter, Professional, and Enterprise - so you can understand whether the CMS Starter license is best for you.
Questions to ask yourself before choosing which HubSpot CMS is right for you:
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How many website pages do you need? The new CMS starter only allows 15 website pages to be built, and multi-lingual versions of pages are included in the 15-page limit. If you have a very small site, this could work well for you, however, anything larger than 15 pages requires the professional licence.
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Do you need more than one blog? CMS Starter allows unlimited blog posts but one blog only. This means that if you have regional blogs or blogs for different product or service lines, you may need to upgrade.
- Do you need dynamic content? CMS Professional and Enterprise both include dynamic content, however, CMS Starter does not. This means you won't have the ability to present different content, CTAs, images and website content to your website visitors based on the information you have on them within the CRM.
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Do you need more than one subdomain? CMS Starter includes one subdomain only, so if you need more than one subdomain across your site, you'll need to upgrade.
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Do you need customisable website analytics reports? CMS Starter includes standard website analytics reports in a dashboard, where the reports can't be edited and filtered by yourself - in order to really dig into the numbers and create bespoke reports the professional licence would be required.
Other features that you might require that are not found in the starter package:
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Live SEO recommendations and suggestions
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Content staging environments
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Call to actions
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Google search console integrations
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Video hosting and management
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A/B testing
Still not sure? Here are the three different licenses explained...
CMS Hub Starter
What is it? A simple content management system for growing businesses who want to leverage the CRM Platform to generate business through their website.
Who is it for? SMB of 1-10 employees
How much is it? from $25/month
Key Features:
A fast, secure, reliable website
Most traditional CMSs leave the security, speed, and reliability of your website up to chance. Or worse yet, require added plug-ins that are a pain to manage and cost more money than you were intending to spend on your website (seriously, these plug-ins can add up to thousands of pounds a year making your cheap CMS the complete opposite!).
But CMS Hub Starter takes care of your site maintenance with built-in security features. This means you can focus on creating an amazing customer experience and building a website that meets your goals, without worrying about the safety or costs associated with these essential plug-ins.
How?
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SaaS CMS
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Standard security features like SSL
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Web application firewall
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Globally hosted CDN with 99.9% uptime
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24/7 monitoring and threat detection
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Automatic updates so you don’t have to worry about installing a potentially dangerous third-party plug-in.
Easily build remarkable websites
Most CMSs force you to make a trade-off between power and ease of use. But if you want to grow your business through your website, you need a CMS that both your marketers and developers love.
CMS Hub Starter lets your developers use the tools and technologies that they prefer to create flexible themes for your marketers to then work within. This allows marketers AND developers to take ownership of the site and work hand in hand -- with marketers able to update the look and feel of their website through easy-to-use drag-and-drop modules, without having to go through a developer first.
How?
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Themes
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Drag and drop page editing
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Landing pages - Free version found in HubSpot’s free tools
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Blogs - unlimited blog posts, but only one blog
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Website pages - Limit of 15 pages on Starter
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Multi-language content management - language variants of pages count towards your 15-page limit
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Advanced menus
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Blog Import
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Site export
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Local development
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Developer documentation & Community
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Marketplace
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Design manage
All-in-one CRM Platform
If your CMS is siloed off from the rest of your tech stack (e.g. your CRM or Marketing tools) then you are seriously limiting your website’s potential.
CMS Hub Starter is built as part of HubSpot’s CRM platform to allow you to leverage customer data in your website strategy and report on exactly what pieces of content are resonating with your audience
How?
CMS Hub Professional
What is it? A content management system for mediums sized businesses who want to leverage their CRM Platform to generate business and provide great customer experiences.
Who is it for? This is for fast-growing companies who want to move away from content systems that require heavy maintenance which makes it difficult for marketers to take ownership of real-time website modifications and day-to-day updates.
How much is it? $400/month
Key Features:
HubSpot CMS Professional has all the features of HubSpot CMS Starter - such as in-built site maintenance and ease of use for marketers - but adds even more tools that allow for personalisation and powerful customer experiences.
Key features that are only included in the Professional tier:
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SEO recommendations - receive on-page SEO recommendations for how you can better optimise your page, without having to use an SEO tool
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Dynamic content - present different content, CTAs, images and website content to your website visitors based on the information you have on them within the CRM
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Contact attribution report builder - accurately report on the success of your content and understand which pieces of content are helping your business drive revenue
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A/B testing & reporting - A/B test your webpages and email content to drive higher success rates and learn what content does and doesn't work for your target customers
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Bespoke reporting - understand how your business is performing by creating bespoke, customisable reports that are unique to your business goals
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Professional CRM - personalise content to the needs of your customers with an advanced CRM platform
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Conversations - have access to HubSpot’s conversations platform, including chat and conversational bots to create magical customer experiences
We ran a webinar with Luke Summerfield on the different Professional and Enterprise HubSpot CMS features. Watch it here.
CMS Hub Enterprise
What is it? This package comes with everything found in Professional, but Enterprise simplifies team management with content partitioning, giving individual team members access to only the content they need to see.
Who is it for? This option is designed for an advanced team looking for more control and the power to build web applications.
How much is it? $1200/month
Key Features:
HubSpot CMS Enterprise has all the features of HubSpot CMS Professional but solves multiple pain points for large enterprises that are managing lots of staff and looking to drive exceptional amounts of revenue via their website.
Key features that are only included in the Enterprise tier:
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Additional root domains - as you grow, you might open up multiple business lines, or require more than just one brand domain. Track all your content within one instance of HubSpot by adding multiple brand domains to your HubSpot instance
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Partitioning - use team permissions to give your team access to only the content that is important to them. Ideal for large companies whose teams can now focus and oversee content only relevant to them
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Adaptive testing - choose up to five variations of a page to test against each other. HubSpot will continuously test each version and serve up the most performant option to your website visitors
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Memberships - allow only specific customers to access a section of your website. Use this to create content for specific segments of your customer base, or manage premium content channels
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Site performance reporting - build custom reporting dashboards for your HubSpot-hosted content. This data can be used to track down outages reported by your end customers, areas of the site that are slow, high traffic areas of the site, how the site is performing over time, and what the site’s overall uptime is in a given period, plus more
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Audit logging - gain control and track down changes to HubSpot content including pages, modules, blogs, images, and CTAs. This data can be digested by marketing managers, agency partners, or IT teams to understand what was changed, who changed it, and how it changed
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Powerful web-apps experiences - Build powerful web-app experiences like calculators, event registrations, and more by leveraging features like serverless functions and dynamic content through HubDB
Have you decided on the CMS for you?
Now you’ve had a rundown of the different HubSpot CMS features, you hopefully have an idea of which license is best for you.
HubSpot is built with growth in mind (or as its goal!) which means you can always scale your CMS system and other tools as you grow, without the need to switch platforms and export lengthy amounts of data each time you need to scale your tech stack. For more information on the different CMS licenses, check out HubSpot’s CMS product page.
At Huble, we love solving for the customer and working with Professional and Enterprise CMS licences. If you're looking for a consultant to help guide your business, feel free to chat with our consultants about your CMS needs by reaching out to us here.
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