The Best HubSpot Alternative in 2026: Kentico vs. HubSpot
Xperience by Kentico brings content management, email, marketing automation, personalization and AI together in one unified, modular DXP with predictable licensing. It gives website-led teams the content depth, hosting choice and developer control that a CRM-led marketing suite like HubSpot just isn't built for.
Ten Reasons Teams Are Choosing Kentico Over HubSpot.
With structured content, built-in marketing, a choice of hosting and 24/7 support from in-house engineers, your team can focus on what matters most: growing your business. Here are ten reasons website-led teams choose Kentico as their HubSpot alternative.
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Unified Platform & Built-In Marketing
Xperience by Kentico brings your websites, email, headless channels and marketing into one product with smoothly integrated AI. Reusable, structured Content Hub items feed every channel, and email, automation, customer journeys, contact tracking, forms and personalization are native digital marketing tools in the platform. HubSpot for Marketers bolts two separate hubs onto a CRM core: Content Hub for websites and Marketing Hub for email and automation. Xperience by Kentico centers content and digital experiences, so every channel draws from one content model.
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Flexible Architecture That Adapts to You
Xperience by Kentico is hybrid headless: marketers can build websites in Page Builder, and the same structured content reaches apps, portals and other front ends via per-channel GraphQL endpoints. Choose single-tenant Kentico SaaS in your chosen data region, or on your own private cloud, with full ASP.NET Core control. HubSpot hosts and renders every page itself, and their documentation explains it blocks developers from system fundamentals, low-level rendering and direct database access. Even HubSpot's own blog admits it isn't strictly headless, only API-adaptable.
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Simplified Workflows That Scale With Your Team
On Xperience by Kentico SaaS, your infrastructure is live in as little as 30 minutes. Editors get multi-step approval workflows, scheduled publishing, shareable preview links, content locking and "Save and create another" for back-to-back pages and items. HubSpot for Marketers Professional and Enterprise force a paid onboarding service ($3,000 or $7,000, one-time) taking up to three months. The open-source Universal Migration Tool imports content when you switch, so partners script the move instead of copying pages manually.
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Higher Value as You Grow
HubSpot's costs increase fast. In October 2026, HubSpot for Marketers Professional costs $900/month annually for three core seats, 2,000 contacts and 3,000 Credits; extra seats are $45/month, contacts are tiered, and AI agents consume credits. Xperience by Kentico is licensed per channel, with unlimited admins and visitors and no contact-based pricing. Websites, email, automation, personalization, journeys, headless and AI share one platform, with no seat fees for new editors, regional marketers, or agency users.
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Built for Marketers and Developers
Xperience by Kentico's Page, Email and Form Builders let marketers create pages, emails and forms from ready-made widgets and templates, with built-in AI to write, refine and translate content and tag images. Developers get code-first .NET with CI/CD and KentiCopilot for AI-assisted development, instead of working within HubSpot's HubL templates and modules. No wonder G2 users rate Xperience by Kentico 90% for ease of use (G2 Winter 2026).
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Predictable Pricing As You Grow
Xperience by Kentico pricing is built from fixed choices: channel number and type (web, email or headless), license tier (Standard or Advanced), a predefined cloud level on SaaS, and an expandable monthly AIRA credit package. Kentico quotes the subscription upfront, with SaaS email volume, bandwidth and storage upgradable. HubSpot's cost, meanwhile, moves with marketing contacts, seats and HubSpot Credits all at once, each growing at its own pace, which makes budgets hard to forecast past the current year.
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Evergreen Updates Without Re-Platforming
Xperience by Kentico is evergreen, with no major versions to re-platform between. Weekly hotfixes and monthly feature refreshes are applied on your schedule. Releases get at least 12 months of support, and deprecated features and APIs keep working 12+ months after announcement. HubSpot, meanwhile, made legacy public unsupported on September 15, 2026, with enforcement in September 2027, when its oldest APIs lose support. Teams with older custom HubSpot integrations face migration within 12 months.
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24/7 Support from Kentico's In-House Engineers
Kentico's support engineers are available anytime on both Standard and Premium Support. Standard, included with maintenance, typically answers within a business day. Need guaranteed response times? Premium adds an annual SLA of 1 to 3 hours by severity, live chat and a priority queue. On Kentico SaaS, business-critical outages from Kentico infrastructure get a first response within 15 minutes. HubSpot rations support by plan: chat and email from Starter, with phone and call-backs only on Professional and Enterprise.
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Built-in Security & Compliance by Design
Stay secure from the start with ISO 27001 certification, SOC 2 Type II audits and single-tenant environments, each with its own application, database and storage, in your chosen data region. Weekly hotfixes address security bugs within seven business days. You get SSO with Microsoft Entra ID, Okta and Auth0; two-factor authentication; granular permissions by role, channel or content section; and consent and data-request tools for GDPR and CCPA. And unlike HubSpot, Kentico can run in your private cloud when your policies require it.
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Proven Success Across Industries
From financial services and healthcare to travel, professional services, associations and the public sector, organizations with demanding standards trust Xperience by Kentico. The platform combines content, digital marketing and multichannel tools in one place, so migrating means consolidating your stack without giving anything up. G2 named Xperience by Kentico a Winter 2026 Leader in both Digital Experience Platforms and Web Content Management, and our 96% for Product Direction shows customers are confident in where we're headed.
All your tools, one powerful platform.
Run your websites, emails, headless channels, campaigns and AI in one platform built around your content. Model content once and reuse it everywhere, personalize pages and emails for each contact group, map customer journeys, and give marketers AIRA's help right where they work. With evergreen updates, channel-based licensing, a choice of SaaS or private cloud and expert support, your team can focus on growing your business instead of managing seats, contact tiers and add-ons. Choose Xperience by Kentico's hybrid headless DXP for content depth, control and a platform that encourages growth.
Comparison Overview: HubSpot and Xperience by Kentico.
| HubSpot | Kentico | |
|---|---|---|
What you buy | Content Hub (website), plus Marketing Hub (email and automation), sold together as HubSpot for Marketers; every hub runs on HubSpot's Smart CRM | One platform with CMS, email, marketing automation, personalization, customer journeys and AIRA, licensed per channel in a Standard or Advanced tier |
Architecture and headless | Fully hosted CMS; HubSpot renders pages on its own servers; not a headless CMS strictly speaking, per HubSpot, but usable headlessly through its APIs | Hybrid headless: Page Builder websites plus headless channels with their own GraphQL endpoints (Advanced tier) |
Hosting options | Hosted and maintained by HubSpot; customer data stored in the US or in HubSpot's EU data center (Frankfurt) | Kentico-managed, single-tenant SaaS in the data region you choose, or private cloud on your own infrastructure |
Time to launch | Fast start on Starter; Professional and Enterprise require paid onboarding ($3,000 or $7,000), which HubSpot says typically takes up to three months for Marketing Hub Professional | SaaS cloud infrastructure ready in about 30 minutes; project timeline depends on scope and partner; Universal Migration Tool imports existing content |
IT dependency | Marketers work independently in drag-and-drop editors; custom functionality must fit HubSpot's framework, with no access to low-level rendering or the database | Marketers self-serve pages, emails, forms and campaigns built from developer-made widgets; developers have full .NET code control |
Upgrade path | HubSpot updates the platform; legacy apps and the oldest APIs lose support in September 2027, so older custom integrations need migration | Evergreen: weekly hotfixes and monthly refreshes, applied by your team or partner, with no major-version re-platforming |
Multisite management | Content Hub Professional includes your core domain plus 9 additional root domains | Multiple websites, email and headless channels managed in one platform with shared content |
Multilingual content | Up to 50 languages on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise | No set limit on languages; language variants with fallback, AIRA translations, and language-specific domains (private cloud) |
Total cost of ownership | Lower entry price, but costs grow significantly as you add users, contacts and AI usage: extra seats ($45 or $75 per seat per month), marketing contact tiers, HubSpot Credits and one-time onboarding fees | Subscription per channel and tier with unlimited admin users, not priced by marketing contacts; AIRA credits in packages; implementation through a Kentico partner |
Pricing transparency | Published list prices and an online price calculator | Licensing model published; price quoted for your configuration |
Support access | Knowledge base and community for all; chat and email from Starter; phone and call-back on Professional and Enterprise | 24/7 in-house engineers; Standard Support included with maintenance (best effort, about one business day); Premium Support with a 1 to 3 hour SLA |
Marketing autonomy | Strong self-service for email, landing pages, workflows and smart content | Self-service content, email, automation, personalization and customer journeys |
Email and automation | Part of Marketing Hub, not Content Hub; omni-channel automation on Enterprise | Built-in Email Builder and marketing automation, with custom triggers, actions and conditions for developers (Advanced tier; email runs on an email channel) |
AI capability | Breeze Assistant and AI agents (Content, Campaign and Nurture agents in public beta); AEO tracking of brand visibility in AI answers (beta); most AI features run on HubSpot Credits | AIRA, built-in AI and agentic support for content, marketing and campaigns ; AI runs on AIRA credit packages; full AI features on the Advanced tier |
Real Companies, Real Results With Kentico
Ease of use
Rated higher on usability by G2 users 5 years in a row.
Faster ROI
Kentico customers report ROI within months rather than years.
Customer satisfaction
Consistently strong customer satisfaction scores on the G2 Grid Report.
Save time with the free Universal Migration Tool.
The Universal Migration Tool, part of the Xperience by Kentico Migration Toolkit, imports content and data from any source, including HubSpot, into Xperience by Kentico. Export content from HubSpot (for example, website pages and blog posts through HubSpot's CMS APIs), map it to the tool's JSON format or build C# models with its .NET library, and import it, including through an upload application in the Xperience by Kentico administration. The tool is open source and customizable, so it can be tailored to your content model and rerun as often as you need before go-live.
The easy-to-use, cost-effective choice for digital growth.
Discover how Kentico can empower your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on what you use HubSpot for. If you want one vendor for content and marketing but need more website and content depth, Xperience by Kentico is a strong HubSpot alternative: one digital experience platform with a hybrid headless CMS, built-in email, marketing automation, personalization and customer journeys, and AIRA, its built-in AI. It runs on Kentico SaaS or in your private cloud, is licensed per channel with unlimited admin users, and was named a G2 Leader for Digital Experience Platforms and Web Content Management in Winter 2026. If you mainly need a CRM, Kentico is not a replacement; it works alongside one.