The best CMS for growth-driven design

HubSpot's product and services catalog marks page A/B testing and adaptive testing in the Professional column of Content Hub, the same column that carries contact create attribution. That is why we crown HubSpot Content Hub for a small B2B marketing team that prioritizes page A/B and adaptive form testing together with contact-create attribution inside the CMS, provided the proposed order confirms the edition, seats, attribution entitlements, publishing access, theme and module upkeep, and fees. We weight those two entitlements most for a team that keeps changing live pages and judges each change by the contacts it creates.

WordPress is the better pick for an existing self-hosted WordPress site whose team wants page tests through Nelio A/B Testing, which marks page testing as included in every tier from its free Starter plan up, and synced patterns, which update everywhere they are used. That pick holds once the hosting and plugin maintenance owners are named and the HubSpot subscription that supplies the reporting is specified.

What should a small B2B team weigh in a CMS for growth-driven design?

HubSpot's A/B test article describes two versions of a page at one URL, each shown to half of visitors, and lists the feature for Content Hub Professional and Enterprise. On WordPress, Nelio A/B Testing runs page tests as a plugin backed by Nelio's cloud service, with a monthly quota of tested page views on each tier. Have the order name the testing entitlement and the permissions needed to run it. For Nelio, have it state the tested-page-view allowance.

HubSpot's guide to building attribution reports defines Contact Create Attribution as a measure of which sources, assets and interactions generated contacts, and lists attribution reports for Marketing Hub and Content Hub at Professional and Enterprise. It marks deal create and deal revenue attribution for Marketing Hub Enterprise accounts only. HubSpot's WordPress plugin adds the tracking code to WordPress pages automatically, and HubSpot counts a view of an external page that carries the code among the interactions it tracks. A team that wants the contact-create report should see the HubSpot edition supplying it named in the order, on either CMS.

Kegan Quimby, a freelance web designer and developer, advises in his CMS selection guide specifying creator and reviewer roles, reusable content, preview, permissions and approval steps when choosing a CMS. Content Hub places content staging at Professional and approval before publishing at Enterprise, so the Professional edition covers staging and stops short of approval. WordPress supplies reuse through synced patterns and limits publishing by user role. Put the editor who will do the work through one task on each product: reusing an approved section and sending the change for review.

WordPress's hardening guide says a host provides security only up to a point and that the site owner has to know where the host's responsibility ends and theirs begins. HubSpot's catalog lists hosting in every Content Hub edition, with a standard SSL certificate, a CDN, a web application firewall and 24/7 security monitoring. If your team has no site administrator, get every recurring task assigned by name before you sign. On WordPress that covers core, plugin and theme updates plus backups, and on HubSpot it covers the theme, whose templates HubSpot says developers code.

HubSpot's pricing page shows Content Hub Professional starting at $450 a month with annual payment selected and 3 Core Seats included. WordPress is open source software licensed under GPLv2. Have the WordPress order name the hosting, Nelio plan and any HubSpot reporting subscription. The HubSpot figure and a WordPress hosting quote therefore cover different things. Ask each side for one first-year figure that includes the edition or plan, seats, hosting, plugins, the HubSpot reporting subscription, domain renewal and setup, then compare those two figures.

HubSpot Content Hub and WordPress compared factor by factor

HubSpot Content Hub: page tests and contact reporting under one subscription

Content Hub Professional is the edition where the catalog marks page A/B testing, adaptive testing, content staging and contact create attribution, and the same table caps Starter at 30 website pages. In an A/B test a visitor keeps the same version for the whole session, and the editor picks the winner from the page's test results, according to HubSpot's A/B test article. Running one requires Marketing Access with edit and publish rights.

An adaptive test runs up to five variations of a page and shows the best performer more often over time. HubSpot requires a form in every variation, and once the test is published the variations cannot be added, removed or renamed. It fits pages whose goal is a form submission.

The catalog describes contact create attribution as a report of which sources, campaigns, referrers, content types or titles drive leads in the contacts database, with tracking capped at 10,000 logged contact interactions. HubSpot's attribution report guide names the models as First Touch, Last Touch, Linear, Time Decay and Empirical. The same guide marks deal create and deal revenue attribution for Marketing Hub Enterprise accounts only, so a team that wants revenue credited to pages needs that subscription written into the order as well.

Editors build a section from modules and save it for reuse, with up to 50 saved sections at a time. Content staging hosts redesigned pages on a sandbox address and can replace several live pages at once. Changes made in staging to a template, global content or a HubDB table show up on the live pages that use them, and HubSpot recommends cloning those assets first.

HubSpot's content approvals article says Content Hub Enterprise is required to put pages and blog posts through approval before publishing. A team that needs that step should ask for an Enterprise quote.

HubSpot provisions a standard SSL certificate automatically when a domain is connected and renews it 30 days before expiry as long as the domain still points to HubSpot. A theme bundles templates that developers code with content and layout that are customized in the content editor, and themes are also available from HubSpot's template marketplace. Ask who updates the theme and any custom modules after launch. The pricing page offers a 14-day trial of Professional.

WordPress: Nelio page tests and synced patterns on a site you already run

Editing a synced pattern updates it everywhere it is used, and a single block can be detached to change it on one page only, according to WordPress's synced patterns documentation. Its roles documentation lets a Contributor write posts without publishing them and lets an Editor publish other users' posts. A team that needs a named approver on every page should specify how that step is enforced, since a role sets who is able to publish.

Nelio meters its plans by tested page views, which its pricing page defines as visits to a page involved in an experiment. The free Starter tier covers 500 a month on one site, and Basic covers 5,000 a month on one site. Multigoal tests and visitor segmentation begin at Basic, and test scheduling and automatic test stopping begin at Professional. The plugin's directory listing says it relies on Nelio's cloud service to manage tests and to process and store results. Nelio offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on subscriptions. Confirm the annual charge at checkout before you budget for it.

HubSpot's plugin help article says the plugin puts forms, live chat, contacts, email, lists and reporting inside the WordPress admin, and that the installer has to be both a HubSpot Super Admin and a WordPress admin. The plugin's own directory listing describes the plugin and HubSpot's CRM as free, with paid HubSpot tiers for further features. HubSpot's tracking code article says HubSpot cannot track a page that lacks the code and warns against installing it twice. The contact-create report is a HubSpot entitlement, so the order for a WordPress site should name the HubSpot subscription that supplies it.

WordPress's plugin documentation says the dashboard flags available updates, which are applied by hand or through per-plugin auto-updates, and it advises a current backup first. Core has a one-click update from the dashboard, and the project's requirements page calls for PHP 8.3 or newer and HTTPS support from the host. Who performs those steps depends on the host or contract you choose, so have that contract name who applies each update and who restores a backup.

WordPress.com's hosting page says the service handles hosting, security, automatic updates and backups, and gives users on the Business plan and above a staging site for trying changes before they publish. That is a different purchase from the self-hosted site this pick assumes, with its own plans and plugin rules to check.

Which CMS should a small B2B team choose for growth-driven design?

HubSpot Content Hub is our pick for a small B2B marketing team that prioritizes page A/B and adaptive form testing together with contact-create attribution inside the CMS, provided the proposed order confirms the edition, seats, attribution entitlements, publishing access, theme and module upkeep, and fees. Professional is the edition that carries both kinds of test and the contact-create report, on hosting that HubSpot runs.

Synced patterns update every page that uses them, and Nelio tests pages on a free tier before any plan is bought. We give more weight to built-in testing and the contact-create entitlement for the crowned buyer, because a small team then has one vendor to hold to the order for both. The crown covers Professional. If pages need approval before publishing, price Enterprise, and if you want deal or revenue attribution, add Marketing Hub Enterprise to the comparison.

WordPress is the better pick for an existing self-hosted WordPress site whose team wants Nelio page testing and synced patterns. The site and its editors stay where they are, and testing arrives as a plugin. Before choosing it, get the hosting and plugin maintenance owners named in a contract and the HubSpot subscription for reporting specified in the order.

Other CMS platforms