[Feedback Request] Why do you use/not use CMS Hub?

[jennysowyrda]

Hi Developers! 

Our @VoiceofCustomer team here at HubSpot wants to hear from you!

Their mission to make you a happier HubSpot customer. They do that by collecting and analysing your feedback across all points in your experience as a HubSpot customer, and importantly, holding HubSpot accountable for taking action on your feedback.

The team is thrilled to be here in the Community to hear your honest take on CMS Hub versus other CMS solutions.

A couple of questions for you:

If you aren't using CMS Hub: 

1. Why not? 

2. What do you use instead?

If you are using CMS Hub: 

1. Do you like it? Why or why not? 

2. What CMS enhancements would make your team's life easier?

Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

[DOge]

This seems like it may be an trouble on our cease. Can you attain out to Support to record a price tag for this? You can try this by using clicking the Help widget in your portal

[Ntbrown]

Literally any of my posts. In short, horrible product design decisions that have made even your attempted modernizations significantly lacking in comparison to any other option on the market - quite literally.

There's no upside for either clients or me as a developer to fight an uphill battle getting anything done just to pump out some subpar hubspot site that lacks any degree of performance or maintain ability in comparison. Much less the significantly longer development times.

Fix everything I've posted. Many more items I can post and then maybe it's halfway there?

[RoelofR]

I'm not using Hubspot CMS; the plans are too advanced/expensive for my use. I'm a one-person consulting boutique and got lured by the CRM part. Currently, I am a CRM Starter Suite user.

I currently use Squarespace for my site but am considering a transition to a new system. The latest update on SquareSpace is not a simple upgrade by clicking a button, but rather a complete rebuild of your site in the new version. The CMS Pro Tier offers way more than what I would realistically need, though the inner-nerd in me sees the added value of some of the features offered.

I am considering:

• A manual upgrade to the latest version of Squarespace
• A transition to Ghost - I like the privacy aspects and mostly being a publishing platform. Integration with Hubspot CRM seems plausible with Zapier, but using an extra tool adds costs/complexity.

I am not considering WordPress again, having run my blog/site there for years I got totally fed up with the plug-ins and manual labour of updating it. Back then, Squarespace offered good looking designs and took care of all the technical lifting.

What I would love to see and which I feel would better accommodate small solo entrepreneurs:

• Some scaled-down, CMS Hub Starter - I would welcome the full integration of my CMS/CRM.
• The features from CRM Pro Suite scaled down to 2 seats/users instead of 5 

[Anonymous]

We've been using HubSpot CMS since 2016 and have undergone two redesigns, mostly to take full advantage of the changes to the CMS and incorporate HubDB.

I worked with HubSpot Agency Partners for the development on both, but the biggest project was leveraging HubDB to create dynamic pages (still in progress for some of our minor content) which has really streamlined our process for keeping content updated (specifically for us, as homebuilders our plans, communities and available homes for sale change on an almost daily basis).

The CMS backend has been easy enough for me to make minor updates on my own with minimal HTML/CSS experience, but the use of modules and templates has been a huge advantage and cost savings for us to get the site updated with a consistent look/feel.

Here is my biggest complaint - marketplace templates are built from head to footer, so if there is a layout you really like for content, it is near impossible to get the branding aligned for the header/footer without help from a developer to untangle the CSS and merge everything together. There has to be a way to build marketplace templates with a placeholder header/footer, but allow for a global header/footer to be applied that can override it. Everything else is plug and play with little technical knowledge. Same is true with email templates, if my team likes a new layout, I have to edit the CSS first to align with our brand before they can start using it.  Modules were recently added to the marketplace, which I think is heading in the right direction, but I haven't tried one yet.

[Ntbrown]

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@Anonymous wrote:

We've been using HubSpot CMS since 2016 and have undergone two redesigns, mostly to take full advantage of the changes to the CMS and incorporate HubDB.

I worked with HubSpot Agency Partners for the development on both, but the biggest project was leveraging HubDB to create dynamic pages (still in progress for some of our minor content) which has really streamlined our process for keeping content updated (specifically for us, as homebuilders our plans, communities and available homes for sale change on an almost daily basis).

The CMS backend has been easy enough for me to make minor updates on my own with minimal HTML/CSS experience, but the use of modules and templates has been a huge advantage and cost savings for us to get the site updated with a consistent look/feel.

Here is my biggest complaint - marketplace templates are built from head to footer, so if there is a layout you really like for content, it is near impossible to get the branding aligned for the header/footer without help from a developer to untangle the CSS and merge everything together. There has to be a way to build marketplace templates with a placeholder header/footer, but allow for a global header/footer to be applied that can override it. Everything else is plug and play with little technical knowledge. Same is true with email templates, if my team likes a new layout, I have to edit the CSS first to align with our brand before they can start using it.  Modules were recently added to the marketplace, which I think is heading in the right direction, but I haven't tried one yet.

---

@Anonymous  This is just poor coding. It's an artifact of a bigger problem within HubSpot. That there aren't any actual good developers that serve this platform. Why would there be? Why would any developer waste their time throwing hundreds of hours into something on HubSpot when I could make something significantly more viable, with a better market / audience, and a fraction of the time on another CMS whilst building more performant / better pages that are significantly more maintanble?

So, what you end up with in HubSpot is a bunch of "developers" from agencies that are really marketers cross-trained with little / if any formal development background or training whose extent of development experience is being able to drag-and-drop a few landing pages together or hack together some contrived CSS.

This is also an artifact of the fact that HubSpot is for marketers so said marketing agencies aren't development shops. and ship client requests out with minimal standards. If you had decent devs maybe you get something good, but you don't. A marketing company simply doesn't have the captial to actually pay any good developer an appropriate salary.

So, what you end up with are exactly what I described above - devs that are signficantly worse than other sectors or novices just getting started desperate for a job and don't mind being over-leveraged / taken advantage of by said marketing companies. There's a few decent Hubspot devs out there, but none that actively participate in the marketplace or provide products for the front-end side of things due to my first point.

Even if they did..... little secret...... building anything truly useful and good in HubSpot is so unbelievably over-complicated due to poor product decisions from a development standpoints that limits devs in what they can build to a point it's just not even worth it. So, the marketplace is flooded with poor products of off-shored ones which naturally come with lots of problems the same as most off-shored development deliverables that you'll realize are fundamentally flawed ~6 months down the road.

You can absolutely do what ou describe it's just a headache and not worth my time to build because of how hubspot is structured.

[DanielSanchez]

Hi Jenny,

Using the HubSpot CMS correctly, makes it possible to drastically reduce the maintenance time of the team, and reduces the risk of maintenance to zero. I managed with CMS and HubDB saving dozens of hours of maintenance for the marketing team here in the company, comparing with the previous process that the customers included, besides allowing secure personalizations without any line of code.

I send some developed projects:

- https://ead.univali.br/
- https://sagah.grupoa.com.br/
- https://ead.ucs.br/pos-graduacao-ead

[nnikolas]

Echoing what someone mentioned above, our entire website is powered through WordPress, WP isn't going anywhere. Hubspot... who knows. I certainly hope we stick with it forever, but that could change as the company grows/acquires/merges so investing in CMS hub seems riskier.

Also, we use a front-end editor for WordPress so editing is incredibly easy and you can customize a ton. Hubspot CMS hub is much more complex for a non-techy person, and we don't want to have to pay an agency partner to build out modules when we can use our WP front end editor and do it in-house. 

[VoiceofCustomer]

Thanks so much for this feedback, it's greatly appreciated!

[VeroniqueMalan]

Hello,

Thanks for asking for our feedback!

We have been using Hubspot CMS for a year now, after hesitating for a long while, as we thought that use rights management was not sufficient yet. As this has progressed, we have now moved most of our sites from Drupal and Wordpress to Hubspot, and the speed of implementation, even by non-technical users has been amazing. One thing that helps us a lot is to have a Hubspot partner agency with very good technical development skills, that is able to design the best templates for us. 

I second the above comments on the general reporting weakness of Hubspot - but am looking forward to seeing the upcoming beta improvements being implemented. 

As for CMS improvements, the number of clicks needed to access the modules drives me crazy sometimes, as well as the lack of consistent "undo" functionality (ctrl-z kicks you out of the module most of the time). 

Being able to rename modules easily in a given page would be a great time saver too. We end up with piles on "Rich Text" modules and have to count them to know which one to open for example.

Thanks again

[VoiceofCustomer]

This is super helpful feedback, thank you Veronique! I will make sure the right teams get to hear it!

[BootstrapC]

Great question. Below is a features list that I consider the best CMS for the job. But I am still trying to formulate the best use cases to help clients make a choice. 

WordPress is less risky because you can do a lot with it and it is more portable. You can migrate sites between hosts, or export post or authors and add to another wordpress site. With larger companies doing acquisitions and mergers this is a common task. But it is also harder to use and can become unwiedly as a frankenstien of plugins and code. Using plugins like ACF and CPT UI you can create custom objects with properties that can be used for anything. 

For small/medium sites with a global footprint, HubSpot is a great option because it simplifies a lot of that complexity. Also it requires less server and database skills because you can leverage HubSpot hosting and HubL to get the data you need.

	WordPress	HubSpot
Cost	x
Portability	x
Add new functionality at a low cost - plugins, ACF, Custom Post types	x
Translation / split testing		x
User management and shared assets		x
CDN, hosting, security, and image editing		x
Reporting and convenience of having one login for site, analytics, crm, etc.		x
Best suited for larger sites	tie	tie
Less risk of running into a tech limitation because you don't have access to server	x
Usability for non technical users		x
Customer support and education		x

[VoiceofCustomer]

Hi Jacob,

Thanks so much for sharing your feedback on how you position HubSpot v Wordpress with your clients. I will definitely be sharing this with our leadership team!

-Amanda

[dennisedson]

Hey @BootstrapC 

Thanks for that chart 😀

Curious if you could go into more detail specifically on the portability and best for large site.

The add new functionality point is interesting.  ACF is a good example, granted that is basically built in to HubSpot, but in my experience with Wordpress plugins (and I am speaking specifically to ones that I inheritted), I feel like I am hit with some impressive technical debt which eats into the cost savings pretty quickly.  

Regardless, good stuff here and thanks!!

[BootstrapC]

Hi @dennisedson I updated my chart previous reply and chart to address your questions.

What I mean by portability :

• Export blog posts and import into another wordpress site
• Move entire wordpress to another host and domain
• Clone and create a prod, staging, and dev environment
• FTP access to move files, rename, etc.

[mboo]

SIMPLE TOO COMPLICATED even your reps cant get my spred sheets to upload ???????????

[VoiceofCustomer]

Hi mboo,

Are you referring to uploading to HubDB? or the CRM? The more specific feedback you can provide, the better! Also, have you tried contacting HubSpot Support?

Thanks,

Amanda

Voice of Customer Team

[sspinolaNG]

I'm talking about your overall blog/web page reporting tool. It's a mess of seemingly randomly placed filtersand sources. You can get visit source data in one place, but not another. You can get session data in one place without an analaytics view but in another place you need it.

Can you please just provide one reporting tool with all the relevant filters? Multiple different reporting tools reporting on the same data with different filters and sources is confusing.

[VoiceofCustomer]

Thank you for providing feedback on our reporting functionality for blog & web pages, I will make sure to pass this on to that team internally here at HubSpot!

[sspinolaNG]

The reporting system is maddening. I should be able to go into Reports, select a report of page traffic data, and be able to filter that report for any page type or section: a specific blog, web pages, landing pages, URL begin, etc., but I can't. I have reports in dashboards that have this data but the system is so convoluted I have no idea how they got there or how or where I created them. Every time I try to recreate them I'm stymied by the inconceivably restrictive filters. It shouldn't be this difficult to report on the activity of a specific blog.