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HubSpot are expanding their product portfolio. The CMS product, which exists alongside the company’s well-known CRM solution, will be revised and renamed CMS Hub. CMS Hub should become a more mature product, and it should bring more prospects and customers to HubSpot. HubSpot sees an opportunity in the mid-market for a SaaS-based CMS with a drag-and-drop interface, integrations with other HubSpot services and simple tools that are in demand for marketeers.

We spoke with Angela DeFranco, Director of Product Management at HubSpot, about the introduction of the new product. CMS Hub is the latest version of the CMS product, and it will get the necessary extra features. There will also be an enterprise subscription available, for customers who want to get the most out of their website, according to DeFranco.

DeFranco announces that HubSpot sees a gap in the mid-market for CMS solutions. It currently sees three product streams in the CMS market. On the open-source side, websites are being built by developers based on Drupal and WordPress. Most companies do have to hire or employ developers to get them up and running. There are also some simple website builders such as Squarespace and Wix. Anyone can build a website with them, but in many cases their functionality is limited. Finally, there are enterprise solutions from Adobe and SiteCore, which offer a very professional CMS. The price tag for these solutions is over 100,000 euros. There’s nothing in between, and that’s the gap HubSpot wants to fill.

HubSpot CMS

CMS Hub is a ready-to-use CMS with which you can quickly build your own website via a drag-and-drop editor, both the templates and the pages themselves. Everything is made as simple as possible so that everyone can work with it. Furthermore, the CMS Hub is full of smart features, DeFranco said. From a contact form to scheduling an appointment in someone’s calendar: the CMS offers support. The CMS Hub also has hundreds of APIs that allow external services to integrate with HubSpot’s CMS Hub.

Ultimately, it comes down to a SaaS-based CMS. The client does not have to do any maintenance, no updates to install and no plugins. Everything works out-of-the-box, and everyone should be able to work with it. 

HubSpot CMS Hub positioning

HubSpot states that it focuses on the midmarket (middle segment) and rightly so. For the smaller entrepreneur, HubSpot CMS Hub is still a pricey product, or you have to be a small entrepreneur who does a lot of marketing or is rebuilding his website every month.

HubSpot CMS Hub is available in two subscriptions, namely Professional and Enterprise. For the Professional subscription, you pay 300 dollars per month, and for that, you can link one domain name. Bandwidth and storage space are both unlimited.

In addition, there is the Enterprise variant, which costs 900 dollars per month. You can link two domain names to your account. Furthermore, you get more possibilities for governance, you can configure the CDN settings yourself, it is possible to add a membership-section to the website, and you can have serverless services programmed and added to the website.

For small entrepreneurs, this is probably too expensive. This group pays a few thousand euros once, has a website built and then does so for about five years.

HubSpots’s CMS Hub is completely focused on the marketeer

In the middle segment, companies are much more aware of their online possibilities. There, they employ marketeers to create more visibility, get products on the website and make sure the website is the business card of the company. A website like that has to be updated continuously, to inform customers and prospects, so that new leads come in.

This group of marketeers now often has to switch with developers to customise certain templates and functionality, or to add features. In some cases, they also need to outsource maintenance, so that the website remains secure and that it is patched in time. This often leads to frustrations and processes that do not always run smoothly.

HubSpot focuses on this group of marketeers with the CMS Hub. The company wants to skip the step where marketeers have to go to developers. Like that, they want to make sure that the marketeers can adjust everything themselves and set it up as desired, through a simple drag-and-drop interface. For this target group, the CMS Hub is not an expensive product either, because they save on the costs of developers and they get a bit of freedom and efficiency in return.

The only question is whether HubSpot will meet all requirements, and whether they can really live up to their claims. Trying to circumvent the work of developers has been tried more often in the past, not always with success. The future will have to tell. In the end, we have not been able to look at the product either. The vision and the story surrounding it are sound, but the customer ultimately determines whether the product will be successful.