Thanks to software like HubSpot, WordPress, and beehiiv, anyone can build a professional website and publish content online without writing a single line of code.

While these platforms share similar features, they each have unique features that make them ideal for different audiences and use cases.

So if you’re trying to figure out which platform is the best fit for your business needs and goals, you’re in the right place. 

I’ve tested all three platforms and dug into dozens of user reviews to put together this comprehensive HubSpot vs WordPress vs beehiiv comparison to help you decide.

Why Trust Me?

Kawusara has 5+ years of experience managing WordPress sites. She’s also passionate about researching and testing software tools and sharing her unique insights in plain, simple language.

beehiiv’s platform is the easiest to use. Since it’s cloud-hosted, you get access to all of its tools when you sign up. 

The interface is simple enough for beginners and non-techies to figure out without much guidance, and you can publish your first post in as little as 10 minutes.

Should you need help, the in-app tours and tutorials walk you through the interface and features, step by step.

WordPress is self-hosted, which means you’ll need to handle the setup yourself—purchase hosting, install WordPress, and configure plugins—before you can start using it.

When you get into your WordPress dashboard, it might seem simple, but don’t let that fool you. You’ll need to spend time watching in-depth video tutorials (thankfully, there are many of them) to learn its features.

Even when you’ve grasped the basics, getting your site to look and function the way you want can take days or even weeks.

Like beehiiv, HubSpot is a cloud-hosted platform and comes with most of its features right out of the box, reducing your reliance on third-party add-ons. 

The interface feels easy to use at first, but the more you dig in, the steeper the learning curve gets. 

That’s because HubSpot bundles several products—CRM, marketing, sales, service, CMS, operations, and commerce—into one platform. Plus, each of these products packs a bunch of features, which can be overwhelming for beginners. 

For big businesses ready to learn it, having everything in one place pays off in the long run.

beehiiv’s website building experience is pretty smooth and straightforward. 

You start by choosing from 12 professionally-designed website templates. You can customize your template’s color palette and typography to fit your brand, and choose the pages (Home, About, Archive, Pricing, etc.) you want to keep for your website.

When you’re set, you can make further tweaks to the template inside beehiiv’s website builder. The builder features a drag-and-drop interface with pre-made sections for things like testimonials, pricing tables, FAQs, and social proof.

This setup makes it easy to put together a polished site even if you have zero design experience.

For starters, WordPress has thousands of themes and templates for building your website.

While you can tweak website templates or build new web pages from scratch in the WordPress editor, it doesn’t work really well.

This means you’ll need to install a page builder like Elementor, Beaver, or Divi (via WordPress’s plugin library) for full control over the design and layout of your web pages. These are freemium tools, so advanced features may require a paid plan.

HubSpot’s website builder comes with 100+ free and paid themes in its marketplace. 

You can filter these themes by business type, the web pages you need, specific page features (forms, pricing, calendar, and more), and price to find a good fit quickly.

Unlike beehiiv and WordPress, HubSpot’s builder has unique features that save you from purchasing extra tools. 

For instance, you can pull in data (team profiles, upcoming events, etc.) from HubDB, HubSpot’s internal database tool, to display on your website, add a booking calendar for appointments, and run A/B tests on page variations to see what converts best.

WordPress’s editor doesn’t look as appealing as those in HubSpot and beehiiv, but it’s still easy to use and gets the job done.

It lets you add text, images, audio, and video to your content, apply text formatting, and embed social posts. When you’re done, you can publish your blog post immediately or schedule it for later.

HubSpot’s blog post editor works pretty similarly to WordPress. 

However, most users will find HubSpot’s editor more intuitive because the tools you need, like on-page SEO optimization, are included by default, so you don’t have to install plugins as you would in WordPress. 

Another difference is that HubSpot shows you exactly how your post will look once published, while WordPress usually requires you to preview the post to see how your chosen theme renders it when it goes live.

beehiiv’s editor has a clean, minimalist layout that keeps the focus on writing.

When you need to add a media file, embed a social post, or call on beehiiv AI to assist with your writing, you can open the tool menu with a slash (/) command.

For teams, the editor supports comments and @mentions, making it easy to share feedback. Once the post is ready, you can send it to subscribers by email, publish it on your website, or do both at the same time.

If your main goal is to grow your website traffic via organic search, WordPress provides the key ingredient you need—an SEO toolset.

By default, WordPress comes with technical SEO tools to help search engines crawl and index your site. 

You can also install on-page SEO optimization tools like Yoast or RankMath, which guide you through optimizing each blog post before it goes live.

Like WordPress, HubSpot provides technical and on-page SEO features to grow your website’s traffic via search; however, all of these tools are pre-built into HubSpot. 

This means you can fine-tune elements like image alt text, internal links, and meta descriptions right inside HubSpot’s editor to ensure your blog posts are optimized for search visibility.

Meanwhile, beehiiv offers diverse tools to support your growth. 

For content published to the web, it provides the essential SEO tools to help them rank in search.

It also has a referral program that lets you reward your email subscribers for bringing in new readers, a recommendations network where you cross-promote newsletters with other beehiiv creators, and a Boosts feature that lets you pay beehiiv publishers to feature your brand in front of their subscribers.

WordPress doesn’t have marketing automation features, but you can add it through plugins from email tools like beehiiv, HubSpot, or ActiveCampaign.

These plugins let you capture email subscribers on your site and send them directly into your automation platform for follow-up campaigns.

beehiiv, on the other hand, lets you build targeted campaigns with its segmentation and automation tools.

You can group subscribers based on their demographics or behavior and use a visual automation builder to create automated email sequences targeted at them. These sequences can be triggered by actions like signing up through a form, replying to an email, or completing a survey.

This comes in handy for promoting upcoming events or product launches.

Meanwhile, HubSpot has a robust workflow feature for automating your marketing, sales, and customer service processes.

For instance, your marketing team could set up a workflow to automatically send a welcome email when someone fills out a form. Your sales team might use it to assign new leads to the right representative, while your service team could route incoming tickets to the right support personnel.

HubSpot doesn’t have earning tools. Its focus is on helping businesses attract and convert leads into sales. 

That said, the Commerce Hub lets businesses manage quotes and invoices, set up one-time payments and subscriptions, and collect payments via Stripe or HubSpot Payments.

With WordPress, you get a variety of earning options via its plugin library.

For instance, content creators can add plugins to sell ebooks, courses, or memberships from their WordPress website. 

E-commerce businesses can use plugins like WooCommerce to build full-blown online stores, and nonprofits can also integrate donation plugins to collect contributions directly through their sites.

Then there’s beehiiv, which is pre-built with earning tools to help content creators, authors, and publishers diversify their income streams. 

This includes making money via placing ads in your newsletters, promoting other beehiiv newsletters, and setting up subscriptions for access to exclusive content.

These tools are easy to set up and have low barriers to entry, and they’ve already helped beehiiv creators generate more than $25 million in revenue.

beehiiv’s analytics dashboard tracks how your content performs across both web and email.

For your emails, you can track the ones with the highest open rates to see which subject lines perform best and the ones with the highest click rates to measure how engaging your content is for readers.

The dashboard also shows subscriber growth over time, top subscriber locations, and the main channels driving new sign-ups—whether it’s from search, beehiiv’s growth tools, social media, or other channels.

WordPress doesn’t have an analytics tool, but you can add one via its plugins. 

The most common option is Site Kit, which connects your site to Google Search Console for tracking the search queries visitors are using to find your website and Google Analytics for tracking user behavior on your website, like page views, bounce rate, and conversions.

HubSpot includes a comprehensive analytics tool that shows your content performance and how your content (along with other marketing efforts) impacts lead generation and sales.

You can also connect HubSpot with third-party analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, bringing all of your key data together in one place.

As cloud-based platforms, beehiiv and HubSpot handle security for you. They protect your website from external attacks, provide SSL certificates to encrypt data, and ensure secure connections between your site and visitors. Also, you don’t have to worry about ever losing your data.

With WordPress, security is your responsibility. You’ll need to purchase and set up an SSL certificate, install security plugins, and create regular backups of your site. 

It’s also important to keep WordPress (along with all installed plugins) updated and compatible to reduce vulnerabilities and keep your site running smoothly.

The WordPress software itself is free, but you’ll need to purchase a custom domain, hosting, and SSL certificate to run it.

These costs could range anywhere from $60 to over $100 monthly. Plus, this figure could rise significantly based on your needs—like whether you purchase premium themes, templates, and plugins, or hire a developer or design agency to maintain your WordPress site for you.

Meanwhile, beehiiv uses a tiered subscription model:

HubSpot’s CRM tool is free, but all other tools are spread across six products (or Hubs, as HubSpot calls them), each with tiered pricing:

The right choice between HubSpot, WordPress, and beehiiv comes down to your business goals.

HubSpot works best for businesses with longer sales cycles that need an all-in-one platform to attract, nurture, and convert leads. 

WordPress is the go-to option if you want to design a flexible website where you can add new features through plugins.

beehiiv is ideal if your goal is to grow an engaged community around your content and generate revenue from it.

The good news is that you can start publishing content on beehiiv without paying a dime. Sign up for a free beehiiv account!

Yes, HubSpot’s Content Hub is good for building websites. It features a drag-and-drop website builder, which makes the design process easy. Unlike WordPress, most tools you’ll need are built into the platform, so you don’t have to rely on plugins.

Yes. HubSpot offers a plugin that lets you capture leads through signup forms on your WordPress website and manage them inside HubSpot.

It depends on your goals. WordPress is ideal if you need to add custom functionality, such as E-commerce, to your website. beehiiv is better if you prefer an easy-to-use newsletter and blogging platform with built-in growth and earning tools.