Hubspot Alternatives – CMS, Blog and Email

In our first deep dive into tools that could be used as Hubspot alternatives, we are going to take a look at the CMS and blogging platform as well as the email marketing tools.

CMS and Blogging Alternative

A content management system and blogging platform is the foundation of your website.  With a content management system, you are empowered to create web pages quickly and easily within a pre-defined framework.  Your blog is simply an extension of your CMS and rather than creating “pages” you are creating “posts”.

Hubspot has a fairly rudimentary blogging and page creation platform that promises to improve over time.  In fact, we are hoping for big news at the 2013 Inbound Conference in August.  The one thing that Hubspot does do is help ensure that your blog posts have some level of search engine optimization by making content recommendations and ensuring that your titles and tags are optimized.

The logical choice for a low cost alternative to Hubspot’s CMS and blogging platform is WordPress.  WordPress is free, and it is the most popular blog/CMS on the planet which means there are a near infinite number of extensions, plug-ins, themes and add-ons that will allow you to quickly and easily customize your site.  In this case, until Hubspot upgrades their blogging and CMS platform, WordPress is not just a Hubspot Alternative, its an upgrade.

Cost: FREE

Email Communications

Hubspot has a pretty good email marketing platform.  There are a gazillion email marketing platforms out there and many of them are serviceable for basic list building and communication that could serve as a Hubspot alternative.  The one that many of the most saavy Internet marketers have been using for years is AWeber.  With AWeber, you can add forms to your WordPress site and those completing your form will automatically be added to the appropriate email list.  Once you get a new lead into an AWeber email list, you can setup autoresponder sequences (also known as “drip marketing”).  AWeber provides complete email tracking so you can easily see who is opening your emails and what they are clicking on once the open it.

Since we would like to compare apples to apples as much as possible for this comparison, we are going to base all our costs as if you had a 2,000 name contact list.

Email is one of the places where Hubspots integrated toolkit really shines.  I would much prefer to use Hubspot to execute and track email campaigns.

Cost: $29/month

 

Jamie Troia is President of Greystack Digital Marketing and author of Stern Rules!