For B2B marketers, choosing a CMS often feels like being caught between two extremes: do you pick the platform that gives you everything in one place, or the one that gives you complete control, but only if you speak fluent API?
Welcome to the great headless CMS comparison: HubSpot CMS vs Contentful.
One offers a marketer-friendly, CRM-connected ecosystem built for lead generation and scale. The other gives your dev team the flexibility to deliver content wherever it’s needed—across sites, apps, and platforms, but leaves you, the marketer, staring at a JSON field wondering how to launch a landing page.
This blog isn’t about dunking on one or crowning a winner. It’s about helping you figure out which CMS model works best for your team: a marketer-led, campaign-driven growth engine or a dev-powered content infrastructure that prioritises flexibility.
Short on time? Long on opinions from your dev team? Here’s the rapid-fire version of the HubSpot vs Contentful decision.
It’s the all-in-one, marketer-first platform that comes with built-in CRM, SEO tools, lead capture, personalisation, and actual dashboards that mean something. It’s like having your campaigns, content, and contacts all under one (very friendly) roof, no third-party duct tape required.
A headless CMS that’s brilliantly flexible, for developers. You can deliver content anywhere: apps, microsites, portals, you name it. But be prepared to build your own marketing stack, connect the dots yourself, and rely heavily on dev support every time you want to change a headline or track a lead.
The bottom line?
If you’re a B2B team that lives and dies by pipeline, speed, and inbound marketing campaigns, HubSpot CMS is your friend.
If your business is dev-led and content delivery spans more than just a website, Contentful can give you the power… as long as you’ve got the people.
When evaluating a CMS, it’s easy to get dazzled by snazzy interfaces or promises of “developer freedom.” But let’s be honest, what matters is how it actually works for your team.
Can you launch campaigns without tears? Track leads without spreadsheets? Avoid three Slack messages and a Jira ticket just to change a hero image?
Here’s how HubSpot CMS and Contentful stack up where it counts…
HubSpot CMS was practically built in a lead-gen lab. Forms, popups, CTAs, A/B testing, they’re all baked in and connected to your CRM straight out of the box. Want to build a landing page with a form that actually sends leads somewhere? No integrations. No code. No stress.
Contentful, on the other hand, gives you… a blank canvas. Want forms? You’ll need to embed something. Want to automate follow-ups? Break out Zapier and a prayer. It’s not that lead generation isn’t possible, it’s just not the point. You’re building the engine yourself. (See how that impacts your website ROI.)
HubSpot CMS and HubSpot CRM are like two halves of the same brain. Every visitor interaction, form fill, page visit, CTA click, is captured, scored, and sent straight to your pipeline.
No duct tape, no missed leads, no Excel exports. And as your team grows, the different HubSpot tiers let you scale functionality without switching systems.
Contentful doesn’t do CRM. At all. If you want contact data to go anywhere meaningful, you’ll need to wire it up manually, via API, webhook, or a third-party tool that hopefully still exists next quarter.
With HubSpot, you get built-in optimisation tools, real-time page recommendations, canonical URL support, and content strategy features that actually link your blogs, landing pages and campaigns together. Think of it as on-page SEO that speaks marketer, especially when you're planning a B2B website redesign.
Contentful, being headless, doesn’t interfere with your SEO… because it doesn’t help you with it either. You can configure meta tags, schema, and URLs, but it’s all on you (or your developer). Great for control. Not so great for speed or guidance.
HubSpot CMS lets you serve dynamic content based on lifecycle stage, location, device, or contact property, without writing a line of code. Smart CTAs? Easy. Language switching?Built-in. Entirely different homepage for existing customers? Done in minutes. It’s all part of HubSpot’s smart content tools, designed to help marketers deliver tailored experiences without relying on developers.
With Contentful, content personalisation is more like a group project. You’ll need conditional logic, API queries, frontend dev work, and ideally, someone who doesn’t mind debugging JSON on a Friday afternoon.
HubSpot’s editing interface is made for marketers. You can drag, drop, edit and publish without breaking anything, or anyone. Campaigns launch faster, changes don’t require a dev sprint, and your team actually uses the CMS. Revolutionary, and one of the reasons it leads many B2B website design trends for modern marketing teams.
Contentful takes a different approach: give marketers a clean, structured content model… and not much else. Layout? Dev job. A/B test? Custom implementation. Updating a testimonial? Log a Jira ticket and hope for the best.
HubSpot grows with your business. From Startup to Enterprise, you unlock features like HubDB, memberships, custom objects, and multi-language support, all within the same ecosystem. No replatforming. No Frankenstein stack. And when you're doing the maths, the cost of HubSpot CMS often balances out when you factor in the tools it replaces.
Contentful scales horizontally across channels and formats, which is brilliant, if you have the development team to match. The bigger your ambitions, the more complex (and expensive) the setup becomes. Think “modular” with a side of “maintenance.”
A CMS might be feature-packed and scalable on paper, but if your team needs to Slack a developer just to update a testimonial, that’s not efficiency, it’s dependency. Here’s how each platform supports (or slows down) the people actually launching campaigns.
HubSpot CMS was designed with marketers in mind, and not the “knows a bit of HTML” kind. The interface is clean, the drag-and-drop editing actually works, and you can build pages, launch CTAs, run A/B tests and track performance without needing dev sign-off or staging environments.
It’s this marketer-first approach that makes HubSpot such a strong fit for B2B teams focused on sales and marketing alignment. Content, forms, emails and reporting all live in the same place, giving you full visibility of what’s working, and where leads are coming from, without switching tools or interrupting someone in product.
Ownership shifts from the dev queue to your marketing team. And once you’ve experienced the freedom of building your own landing page in 10 minutes (with built-in CRM tracking), there’s no going back.
Let’s be clear: Contentful isn’t unusable for marketers. It just doesn’t put them in the driver’s seat. You can add and manage content using a structured interface, but layout, logic, and publishing workflows are all owned by developers.
That works well if you have in-house devs who like building bespoke front-end experiences. But if your marketing team wants to test messaging, spin up a gated asset page, or edit the homepage banner before a launch, Contentful adds friction.
It’s not about capability, it’s about control. And in a world where speed matters, relying on a sprint cycle just to update a form isn’t always viable for B2B marketing teams.
When you’re choosing a CMS, you’re not just buying functionality, you’re investing in your marketing infrastructure for the next 3–5 years. So it’s worth asking: which platform sets you up to scale without spiralling complexity (or headcount)?
Not every CMS is built for every team. Some want control, others want speed. Some want power tools, others want plug-and-play. So how do you choose between HubSpot CMS and Contentful?
Here’s how the platforms compare when it comes to team type, tech requirements and business goals:
Criteria |
HubSpot CMS |
Contentful |
| CMS Type | All-in-one | Headless |
|
Best for |
B2B marketers, inbound teams | Dev-led teams, multi-channel delivery |
| Lead Generation Tools | Built-in forms, CTA's, automation | Requires integrations (e.g. Zapier, Typeform) |
| CRM Integration | Native with HubSpot CRM | None, needs manual API connection |
| Marketing Ownership | High, no-code editing, personalisation | Low, relies on developer input |
| SEO Support | Built-in optimisation tools | Manual configuration |
| Scalability | Grows across HubSpot tiers | Grows with custom builds and developer resource |
| Tech Dependency | Minimal | High |
| Time-to-launch | Fast, ideal for agile companies | Slower, depends on dev capacity |
| Tool stack needed | All-in-one | Multiple third-party tools |
So, which platform suits your setup?
Still unsure which CMS fits best?
In the final section, we’ll summarise the trade-offs and help you make the call based on what matters most to your team’s growth, speed, and sanity.
There’s no universal “best CMS”, only the best CMS for your team, your goals, and your growth plan.
Some businesses need the freedom to build across channels, stitch together tools, and control every technical detail. Others need to move fast, launch campaigns, and track results, all without waiting on the dev queue.
Here’s the truth:
Want to make the right CMS choice part of a smarter website strategy?
Read our Ultimate Guide to B2B Website Design - it’s packed with advice to help you plan a site that generates leads, scales with your team, and actually delivers ROI.
Whether you’re migrating, replatforming, or just exploring, this guide will help you build a site that works for marketing, not against it.