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 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.

In practice, most creators install a page builder plugin like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi to design pages more flexibly. These tools add drag-and-drop functionality, but they’re typically freemium, meaning advanced features require a paid plan.

WordPress ultimately wins on raw customization thanks to its massive ecosystem of 59,000+ plugins. However, that flexibility comes with trade-offs — more plugins often mean more maintenance, potential security risks, and occasional plugin conflicts that can break parts of your site.

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.

The downside is that while HubSpot is powerful, it becomes expensive quickly, especially as you scale.

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.

When you’re done writing, you can publish immediately or schedule the post 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.

The limitation is that HubSpot separates blogging and email publishing. If you want to send a blog post to subscribers, you’ll typically need to create a separate email campaign referencing the post, which adds another step to the workflow.

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.

Every time you publish a newsletter, it can simultaneously be sent to subscribers and published as an SEO-friendly blog post on your website. This means a single piece of content can reach readers through email and organic search without requiring additional workflows or tools.

For content creators and publishers, this eliminates the need to write once for email and again for your blog — the same piece of content powers both channels automatically.

One major factor that most comparisons between blogging platforms overlook is email distribution.

Publishing content is only half the battle — the other half is getting that content in front of readers consistently. This is where the differences between beehiiv, WordPress, and HubSpot become much clearer.

beehiiv is a newsletter-first platform, which means email distribution is built directly into the product rather than added through integrations.

Every piece of content you publish can be sent to subscribers as an email and published to your website simultaneously, eliminating the need for separate tools or workflows.

Beyond basic sending, beehiiv includes a range of advanced email tools out of the box, such as:

Because these features are native to the platform, creators can run a full newsletter operation without needing additional email marketing software.

HubSpot supports email marketing through its Marketing Hub product.

While this gives you access to powerful tools — including advanced automation workflows, personalization, and CRM integrations — it comes at an additional cost.

Email functionality is not included in HubSpot’s CMS alone, and most businesses will need a Marketing Hub plan, which can range from roughly $15/month to $890+ per month depending on features and scale.

For companies running complex marketing funnels this can be extremely powerful, but for newsletter-first creators or publishers, it can quickly become expensive and unnecessarily complex.

WordPress has no native email marketing functionality.

If you want to send newsletters to subscribers, you’ll need to integrate a third-party email marketing platform using plugins or external tools such as Mailchimp, FluentCRM, or other email services.

While this approach works, it introduces additional cost, setup time, and maintenance, especially as your email list grows.

It also means your content publishing and email distribution live in separate systems, which can complicate workflows compared to platforms where both are built together.

In short:

Growing an audience requires more than just publishing content. The real challenge is turning readers into subscribers and expanding your reach over time. Each platform approaches this differently.

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. While WordPress excels at organic traffic growth, most subscriber acquisition tools — such as popups, referral programs, and email capture systems — require additional plugins or third-party services.

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.

Because these tools are native to HubSpot, you don’t need to install plugins to manage SEO.

However, most advanced audience growth features — especially those focused on newsletter expansion — typically require additional marketing tools or higher-tier HubSpot plans, which can increase costs quickly.

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.

These tools are integrated directly into the platform, meaning creators can grow and monetize their audience without needing additional plugins or marketing tools.

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.

Search engine visibility and site performance play a major role in long-term audience growth. All three platforms provide SEO capabilities, but they approach it differently.

beehiiv is built for content-driven publishing, so its website infrastructure is optimized specifically for blogs and newsletters.

Every newsletter you send can automatically publish as an SEO-friendly blog post, meaning a single piece of content can generate traffic from search engines and email subscribers at the same time.

beehiiv’s website builder also includes essential SEO features such as:

Because publishing and distribution happen in the same platform, creators can capture organic search traffic while simultaneously delivering content directly to inboxes.

This dual distribution model is something neither HubSpot nor WordPress provides natively.

HubSpot provides one of the most comprehensive built-in SEO toolsets among website builders.

The platform includes:

These tools are integrated directly into the content editor, allowing you to optimize blog posts as you write.

For companies focused on lead generation and inbound marketing, this tight integration between SEO, CRM data, and analytics can be extremely powerful.

WordPress provides strong SEO foundations but relies heavily on plugins for advanced functionality.

Out of the box, WordPress allows search engines to crawl and index your site effectively. However, most creators install plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath to manage on-page optimization.

These tools help with:

Because WordPress is highly customizable, it can become one of the most powerful SEO platforms available — but achieving that level of performance typically requires configuring multiple plugins and tools.

One major difference between these platforms is how easily creators can generate revenue from their content.

beehiiv includes four built-in monetization streams, all with 0% platform fees.

Creators can earn through:

Because these tools are native to the platform, there is no need for plugins, payment integrations, or complex setup.

Creators on the platform have collectively generated $25M+ in revenue, making beehiiv one of the fastest-growing monetization ecosystems for newsletter publishers.

WordPress can support monetization, but it typically requires a stack of plugins and integrations.

For example, many publishers use:

This setup can easily cost $300+ per year in plugins alone, and it requires ongoing maintenance to ensure everything continues working together.

HubSpot includes commerce functionality through Commerce Hub, which allows businesses to handle payments, invoices, and subscriptions.

However, it is designed primarily for B2B sales workflows, not content creators.

HubSpot does not offer built-in tools for monetizing newsletters or blogs, such as:

As a result, it’s not typically used as a content monetization platform.

HubSpot is best suited for companies that want an all-in-one marketing and sales platform rather than just a website builder.

Businesses using inbound marketing, CRM-driven lead generation, and complex sales funnels often benefit most from HubSpot’s ecosystem.

Content Hub

Marketing Hub

Important: Newsletter creators typically need both Content Hub and Marketing Hub to access full email marketing functionality.

WordPress is ideal for businesses that want maximum customization and control over their website infrastructure.

Because it is open-source and highly extensible, WordPress can power everything from simple blogs to complex e-commerce stores and enterprise websites.

WordPress.org itself is free, but running a production website requires additional costs.

Typical expenses include:

For most businesses, the realistic total cost is around $60–100+/month for a properly configured website.

Many companies also pay developers or agencies $500–$2,000 per month for maintenance and updates.

beehiiv is best suited for newsletter creators, independent publishers, and media businesses that want to grow and monetize an audience.

Unlike traditional CMS platforms, beehiiv combines newsletter publishing, blogging, audience growth tools, and monetization in a single platform.

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:

Switching platforms might sound complicated, but moving to beehiiv is usually straightforward. Most migrations come down to exporting your subscriber list, importing it into beehiiv, and republishing your content.

beehiiv also offers migration documentation and support to help creators transition smoothly.

If your current site runs on WordPress, the migration typically involves two main steps: moving your subscribers and your content.

1. Export your subscribers

If you’re using an email plugin or external email service (like Mailchimp or FluentCRM), you can export your list as a CSV file.

beehiiv allows you to import subscribers via CSV, making it easy to bring your audience over.

2. Connect your WordPress site

beehiiv provides a WordPress plugin that helps connect your site with your newsletter workflow. This can be useful if you plan to continue running a WordPress site while publishing newsletters through beehiiv.

3. Republish key content

Many creators choose to republish their most important posts as beehiiv newsletter issues, which automatically become SEO-friendly blog posts on their beehiiv site.

This approach lets you gradually rebuild your content library while also turning past posts into email content for subscribers.

Migrating from HubSpot usually involves moving your contacts and newsletter content.

1. Export your contact list

HubSpot allows you to export contacts as a CSV file, which can then be imported into beehiiv.

During import, you can also preserve useful fields such as:

2. Transfer paid subscribers (if applicable)

If you run a paid newsletter, beehiiv integrates directly with Stripe. Paid subscriber information can typically be transferred so users keep their subscription status.

3. Recreate automations and newsletters

Most creators rebuild essential email sequences and publish past newsletters on their new beehiiv site.

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.

HubSpot offers a more streamlined website building experience with built-in hosting, security, and CRM integration, making it ideal for businesses that want everything in one platform. WordPress provides far more customization through its massive plugin and theme ecosystem but requires more technical management. For content creators focused on newsletters and audience growth rather than CRM or e-commerce, beehiiv offers the easiest path to publishing — with a website, newsletter, and monetization tools included from the free plan.

Yes. HubSpot offers a WordPress plugin that lets you capture leads through forms on your WordPress site and manage them inside HubSpot’s CRM. Many businesses run WordPress for their website and HubSpot for marketing automation. Similarly, beehiiv integrates with both platforms — you can embed beehiiv signup forms on WordPress sites and sync subscriber data with HubSpot CRM.

WordPress.org is free to download but requires paid hosting, security plugins, and ongoing maintenance. HubSpot’s free CMS tier is limited in features and doesn’t include email marketing. beehiiv’s free Launch plan supports up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited email sends, a hosted website, and access to growth tools — making it the most complete free option for creators who want to publish content and grow an audience from one platform.

beehiiv offers the most diverse monetization options: paid subscriptions with 0% platform fees, a built-in Ad Network connecting you with premium advertisers, a Boosts marketplace where you earn by recommending other newsletters, and direct sponsorship management tools. HubSpot focuses on lead generation and sales rather than content monetization. WordPress requires paid plugins like WooCommerce and MemberPress to enable monetization, with costs that add up quickly.

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform with extensive customization, but it requires plugins for SEO optimization, email capture, and monetization. beehiiv combines blogging with newsletter publishing — every post can be sent to subscribers via email and published on your website simultaneously. For bloggers who want to build and monetize an email audience alongside their blog, beehiiv is the more efficient choice. For bloggers who need complex site functionality like e-commerce or membership portals, WordPress is the better fit.