Best Marketing CMS in 2025: HubSpot, Webflow, Wordpress etc.

Popular marketing website CMS (content marketing systems) with pros, cons, and key business considerations. Includes Hubspot CMS Hub, Webflow, Wordpress, etc.

Key CMS Considerations in 2025

The “Best” Marketing Website CMS 

It’s impossible to pick a global “best” marketing website CMS (Content Management System) as the ideal CMS will always be dictated by business needs, team structure, website complexity, and digital growth goals. When evaluating CMS technology, consider the following questions:

• Who will be creating/editing/updating content and where? 
• Are these technical or non-technical users/teams?
• What does your content review process look like? Who should have the final sign-off and how is sign-off represented in the CMS? 
• How frequently will content be updated and where (globally/blogs/etc.)? 
• Do you need to deploy website updates in real-time or with short/immediate turnarounds (24 hours or less)?
• What QA (Quality Assurance) resources and processes do you have in place to balance website updates with quality control?
• Do you require a tool that can store assets (videos, files, images) or will you be using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)? 
• Who is responsible for website uptime and availability? Do you request the CMS to provide this as part of website hosting?

Consider Hosting Requirements and Network Deliverability

Some CMS tools include website hosting as part of their offering (ie. content will be served from their servers) while others (particularly open source tools) are only frameworks to create/manage content but the hosting is not provided by the CMS.  

Consider Total Cost of Ownership

Free or open-source systems have the significant advantage of no price which makes them easy to POC (Proof of Concept). However, if your web team requires significant support and onboarding you may end up paying more via third parties than you would with a traditional paid SaaS CMS where this is included in your license cost(s). 

No-Code Options: Wix, Squarespace, etc.

Wix and Squarespace specifically target businesses looking to build a website without traditional web development – the pitch is that it's easy to create/edit a website without ever needing to worry about or edit website code. They advertise aggressively and rely heavily on partner advertising for new businesses. Ultimately the promise is to easily create an industry-leading website without any code editing.

Wix and Squarespace invest heavily in their free sign-up process making it easy to get started with a simple website and they even include features like lead forms or chat that would normally be additional business costs. Their heavy visual sign progress makes it easy to start a website, but ultimately difficult to scale as the inability to add new functionality via custom code creates too many limitations.  

Additionally, their closed website system makes it difficult/impossible to migrate your website, locking you into an ever-increasing SaaS monthly price.

I’ve talked to small businesses that have used Wix or Squarespace, but they always regret starting with these and eventually migrate to other tools due to too many limitations in growing their websites.

Recommendation: Only consider the no-code options above if you are launching a website you don't expect to edit or modify frequently. Otherwise, Webflow is a better overall option. 

Start-up and Small to Medium Business Options: Hubspot CMS, Webflow

HubSpot CMS Hub

HubSpot CMS Hub is a popular choice for companies that rely heavily on HubSpot’s CRM technology. HubSpot CMS Hub scales well for small companies and those that rely heavily on blogs to publish new content. Editing web page content is a breeze but unfortunately, design is dictated by their propriety language Hubl (Hubspot Markup Language). The clients and companies I’ve worked with find implementing designs with this proprietary system difficult. The clients I have worked with usually couple website redesigns with a new CMS due to the complexity of having to build design frameworks and templates in Hubspot’s proprietary language.

I worked on a large-traffic website in 2017 that ran on the HubSpot CMS Hub, and our account manager dropped the bombshell that HubSpot was actively planning to eliminate the ability to edit custom HTML in the HubSpot CMS Hub, planning to rely only on the visual editing and formatting interface. We were very vocal to HubSpot that this decision would ultimately force us to move CMS but we were told “decision is final”. Ultimately, HubSpot abandoned the decision at the eleventh hour but by then we had already started migrating to another technology. 

Considering HubSpot’s large volume of CRM customers I’m also surprised that CRM personalization and a/b testing in the HubSpot CMS Hub are quite limited.

Webflow

Webflow strikes the best balance of a “low-code” website CMS that can scale for small to medium businesses. Multiple professional website templates exist to get started and even the basic-tier paid plan supports a decent-sized website (150 pages) with generous bandwidth allowances (50 GB / 250k visitors per month). The visual editor accurately reflects website design across breakpoints and features like publishing to staging and production or implementing website redirects are very easy to use for small teams. Additionally, I’ve only ever run into very minimal downtime with Webflow and due to how they package website builds website page loads tend to be faster than comparable CMS systems. 

However, Webflow has significant limitations that keep it from scaling to a true enterprise platform:

• Seat-Based Pricing Limits Individual Contributors: At the workspace level plans are charged per seat which can quickly become expensive when working across larger teams or including third parties.
• All-or-nothing Deployment Options: When deploying website changes, you cannot limit publishing changes for one specific page or set of pages. All pages that have changes saved are deployed at once. In an enterprise environment where teams are actively working on multiple changes to launch on individual dates, this becomes a micromanagement nightmare. 
• Web Development Limits: Webflow has limits on the lines of custom code per page in their editor making it difficult to load code libraries that are not hosted elsewhere. Additionally, Webflow still doesn’t support React though this is consistently one of the most popular feature requests. 

Recommendation: Between the two above I’d still recommend Webflow above HubSpot’s CMS Hub, though I'd caveat this for smaller teams where concurrent website editing is limited. 

The Incumbent Juggernaut: WordPress

WordPress has over 50% market share and it’s no huge surprise: WordPress is free, open-source, and has the largest amount of third-party plugins. Plugins like Elementor (easy visual editing) and Yoast (SEO optimization) are truly best-in-class. Additionally, WordPress website templates are a dime a dozen making it easy to find a great design to power your website.

WordPress is fantastic if you’re primarily running a website blog. If you’re looking to build a large marketing website with several discrete pages and sections, however, you’ll quickly realize that WordPress is highly opinionated in how content is created, stored, and displayed on a website. Trying to turn a website CMS optimized for blogging into the main framework for your business content is certainly possible, but be can quickly become a huge time-sink depending on your complexity.

WordPress is unfortunately also the largest target for hacking with out-of-date plugins, database vulnerabilities, and legacy versions. Companies in highly regulated industries, IT/ security, or software SaaS should seriously consider if these downsides are worth it.

From a website speed/performance perspective, WordPress is also often one of the slowest I’ve seen to render content (though to be fair this may have more to do with hosting setup than the tool itself). Regardless, in my professional experience, I’ve only ever seen companies move away from WordPress to other systems than to WordPress.  

Additionally, WordPress' co-creator has a had very public feud with WP Engine (a common WP host) which has resulted in some WordPress sites having their plugin access removed. Tech Crunch has a great summary on the back and forth. 

Recommendation: Unless you are primarily running a large blog I would highly recommend alternatives.  

Headless CMS Systems: Contentful, StoryBlok, Strapi, Sanity, Builder.io etc.

Headless CMS systems are a great consideration for websites that are owned/maintained outside of marketing (ie. via engineering teams) or deployed as part of a monolithic app. Content can easily be created /added directly into the respective SaaS platforms and loaded into a website, mobile app, or elsewhere via API calls. 

Notably, headless CMS systems de-couple website design (look and feel) from website content which may be a pro or con depending on an organization’s design maturity and design team size. 

One key consideration for headless CMS tools is the total cost of ownership. Pricing is usually determined by API calls - if you scale website content rapidly and double/triple website traffic you’ll potentially get charged API overages unless you invest in custom development work into caching or other approaches to optimize API calls. 

Recommendation: Contentful is the largest and has the best global up-time, Strapi is best suited to developers while Builder.io includes a/b testing and personalization features.

Enterprise CMS Systems: Craft CMS, Sitecore, etc.

Sitecore

Sitecore is a behemoth and extremely opinionated in its implementation/usage. I remember editing content in Sitecore as part of a larger digital team and we required significant internal documentation as there were odd nuances with the technology and how changes could be saved. That being said, SiteCore was by far the best CMS I used to work across multiple, localized websites and shines in that enterprise use case. 

CraftCMS

CraftCMS is an enterprise CMS used by several of the world's largest websites: Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and more. One of the biggest advantages of Craft CMS is its flexibility – unlike a CMS like WordPress, CraftCMS makes no assumptions about your website and can be customized for a variety of use cases. Custom fields make it easy to cross-relate different types of content paving the way for personalization and heavy website segmentation.

The biggest downside in my opinion is that CraftCMS requires at least one or more developers to manage/build the inputs and structure to edit and update page content within the platform. This development loop to implement content fields and templates within Craft is not insignificant and can quickly become a bottleneck to rapid content development.

The CraftCMS documentation has made significant progress in the past years but ultimately every client I’ve worked with that used CraftCMS had to rely on at least one internal expert or third parties to implement or optimize their setup.  

Recommendation: If you’re looking for a highly customizable CMS with the ability to create multiple custom fields and connections I’d recommend exploring ProcessWire instead.

Static Site Generators: Netlify, Jekyll, Grav CMS, etc.

Static site generators create the fastest websites as content is packaged in the web development/web operations process and then delivered as a traditional web application where all content is front-loaded and not rendered dynamically as users navigate websites. These work great with small web development teams but in my personal experience scale poorly for marketing websites. Unless paired with a Headless CMS like Contentful content creation requires at least some minor development skill(s) and shared access to a GitHub repo which organizations may hesitate to share with non-developers or teams that operate outside of a traditional code review process. 

Recommendation: Netlify is by far the largest and best-documented site generator and the one I’d recommend using for websites that are fully owned and updated by web development teams.