ExpressionEngine vs. HubSpot Content Hub

ExpressionEngine is a very powerful and flexible content management system. It can handle a simple small business website all the way to a large corporation's website. If you are a business with multiple websites ExpresionEngine can handle that as well with it's Multiple Site Manager. I think ExpressionEngine would be less appropriate for a global large scale business with a magnitude of sites with different regions and languages.

Incentivized

If you want all your marketing activities to be in one place, where your CRM and customer data exist, go for Hubspot's entire suite, which could include CMS, depending on your needs. If you have to create a company blog, marketing landing pages for events or lead generation, or send decently designed newsletters, Hubspot does the job well. Any company that has grown to enterprise level or has fragmented marketing should probably not use Hubspot CMS because of the fragmented activities that might occur. Hubspot's reporting can also break. Also, if you want your designed pages to be very creative with many animations, Hubspot CMS is probably not the way to go. But for anyone who is still finding their footing, go for it.

Incentivized

• Content structuring. You can set up channels and fields to hold just about any kind of information imaginable; text, images, videos, numbers, code, etc. You can structure this information any way you want and in any order. You literally create your own information database just the way you want it using a clear, easy online interface.
• Template system. Utter freedom. Need I say more?
• Exensible. There are a lot of add-ons, extensions, and other external modules that extend the core functionality of ExpressionEngine. Need a user management system? Check out the User module at http://solspace.com.

Incentivized

• Asset control is super easy if your willing to create folder structures that make sense
• Drag and drop building elements are great, even if you create custom blocks
• control of domains and how they link into your main system is super easy

Incentivized

• For me, one of the greatest strengths of ExpressionEngine is also one of their weaknesses. There are so many add-ons available (some free, some not) for ExpressionEngine to allow you to do just about anything you want. However, the more add-ons that you use the more you have to deal with when performing updates. For instance, is the add-on compatible with the new version of ExpressionEngine - or even another add-on? What if that add-on gets abandoned by the developer - is there another that can perform the same functionality?
• I think that ExpressionEngine needs to offer more out of the box than it does. Yes, you can get add-ons for just about anything but this adds to the cost. I have a list of add-ons that I use on almost every site which can raise the cost of getting started with a new site by $100-300. So add that to the cost of a license and you're at $400-600 and you haven't even started working on it yet. For instance, I shouldn't have to buy an add-on to allow me to customize the menu for my end-users.
• The membership management feature is seriously lacking. Fortunately, there are add-ons (for an additional cost) to allow you to manage things better.

Incentivized

• Although you can integrate it with Google Analytics, there is still a significant difference between what each tells you about [a] number of visitors to a given page, etc.
• There's a lot to the program and it's not always intuitive where to go for a feature. Though the help center and academy are good and usually have the answers, having to look things up isn't.
• It's expensive.

Incentivized

I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.

I don't think we justify the amount of usage we have of CMS Hub professional. We might discontinue it to save some bucks. But if we ever need an extensive solution, we'll come back to it, as we already other products of Hubspot (Sales Hub, Reporting, Automations)

Incentivized

ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.

HubSpot CMS HUB is well-rounded and brings a robust list of capabilities while maintaining an ease-of-use that beginners can engage. HubSpot is by far the best at doing this among the half-dozen or so CMS platforms I've used in my 20+ years experience. It turns glorified business card websites into purposeful marketing machines that become a key part of a marketing strategy rather than a complicated and frustrating mess.

Incentivized

Never experienced an issue like this with it

Incentivized

As of now we didn't face any application errors and unplanned outages.

Incentivized

The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating

Incentivized

Yes the pages load fastly and this tool is pretty good in integration with other tools like zapier, calendly and so on.

Incentivized

I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me

They are always there to help in any way possible. Our account manager works out any situations we may encounter during business hours

Incentivized

Pretty easy and resources available at fingertips.

Incentivized

After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.

Yes, recreation of landing pages, forms and email templates.

Incentivized

ExpressionEngine is vastly more flexible than any other content management system I have used to date and the quality of the add-ons are significantly higher than what you find in other directories. The ExpressionEngine community is also very willing and helpful with if you have any questions or run into any issues.

Incentivized

We have about 10 seats that were needed. Wanted a sales platform that had good status and reputation. HubSpot was the best choice for me given Salesforce not being the best in the past. Price was appealing and our team liked the overlay. Other options do not provide the same ability with data

Incentivized

Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version

Incentivized

Because it aligns with our goals and streamlined all the hubspot at one place.

Incentivized

• Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
• We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
• As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.

Incentivized

• When I was using it I couldn't see the direct return on investment since I was only seeing web development.
• Practicality when creating articles and content
• Efficiency when creating landing pages, basically content and interactions, but no return on investment in money.
• Cuando lo estuve usando no pude ver el retorno de inversión directa ya que solo veía desarrollo web
• Practicidad al momento de crear artículos y contenido
• Eficiencia al momento de crear landings, basicamente contenido e interacciones pero no retorno de inversion en dinero

Incentivized