I’m looking for insight into your use of the Marketing Hub–especially if you work for a non-profit org or association.
Additionally, I’d love insight from anyone who has used the Hubspot CMS for their business website. Pros? Cons? Themes used, etc?
We’re mid-implementation of the marketing hub now and are super excited to get started with it. I’m also evaluating the feasibility of the CMS to move our website over. We’d be moving from a fully custom site and I’m hoping to simplify, reduce our investment in our site, and empower our marketing and tech staff teams to manage more of the site themselves vs. paying developers and outside agencies for help.
Welcome to the community, and congrats on being mid-implementation
A few thoughts that might help as you evaluate the CMS move:
On the Marketing Hub side, a lot of nonprofit and association users find the contact segmentation and email tools especially valuable for managing member communications and donor outreach. If you haven’t already, it’s worth exploring the nonprofit discount program if you haven’t applied yet.
On the CMS question — moving from a fully custom site is a big decision, but the self-sufficiency angle you mentioned is one of the biggest wins teams tend to report. The drag-and-drop editor and theme marketplace make it much easier for non-dev staff to manage day-to-day updates without touching code. The tradeoff is that highly custom designs can sometimes require workarounds, so it’s worth auditing which parts of your current site are truly custom vs. what could be replicated with an out-of-the-box theme.
The HubSpot Theme Marketplace is a great place to browse what’s available and get a feel for flexibility.
Hopefully others in the community will chime in with their firsthand CMS experiences — this is a great question for the group!
Long time Content Hub User and Content Hub/CMS focused developer here.
From my experience I’d put it like this:
Moving from a fully custom site to a CMS, especially the Content Hub will give you tons of benefits.
Content Hub, even in the Free or Starter version is super powerful. Professional tier is the sweet spot and has basically no limits with a good HubSpot developer on your side. Enterprise has a few nice features over Professional, but isn’t really worth the money unless you got very specific requirements.
Here’s a quick overview:
Every tier:
API access (look at the individual API limitations if required)
Design Manager access
Marketplace access
Free and Starter:
Limited in websites (30) and landing pages (30)
1 Blog with up to 10.000 posts
Professional:
Up to 10.000 websites and 10.000 landing pages (10k in 1 language, 5k in 2 languages..)
“No limits” in languages (up to 40)
Up to 100 Blogs with 10.000 posts each (10k posts per language; 10k in 1 language, 5k in 2 languages…)
Content-Sync (can be done with APIs in lower tiers for basically free)
Content approvals
A few tips:
Get yourself a free developer test account to keep your main portal clean. Such a test account can be created in your live portal in Development (left navigation) → test accounts → Create test account. - You can have up to 10 such test accounts per portal, but 1-2 should be enough in most cases
Once you got such a test account, look into the Marketplace for themes which cover around 80% of your requirements and install a few to test them. Important note:Paid themes can’t be transferred between portals (don’t buy one in a test account)
If you shouldn’t find something fitting, you can always create a child-theme of the theme and modify every little aspect of it - as an alternative, you can create custom themes tailored to your specific requirements.
While I love creating custom themes for my clients as they got no limitations, most times they’re more expensive and take longer. On the other hand, they’re got absolutely no restrictions (Marketplace themes got a few restrictions by default) are better scaleable, maintainable and can be tailored completely to your requirements.
In the test account, you have almost everything that’s available in the tier you’ve set the test account. Therefore, you can use it to learn, test and play around while keeping your live portal clean.
Anton, this is so helpful! Thank you! Would you mind if I set up 30 minutes for us to chat? I have a few questions about themes, how you work with your clients, and how we might be able to handle a few functionality details if we transition from our fully custom site to a HubSpot site.
