The best hosted CMS platforms

WordPress.com is the hosted, managed form of the software a very large share of the web already runs. The distinction matters and is widely misunderstood: the software is free and can be installed anywhere, and this is a company selling the hosting, updates, backups and support around it as a subscription.

What that buys is a ceiling far above small-business scale together with a genuine exit. Plugins are available from the entry paid plan, the content model handles a site that grows into thousands of pages, and an export produces a file another WordPress installation will read — so leaving means moving rather than rebuilding, which is not true of most of this category.

The cost is that it feels like software rather than a builder. There are more concepts to meet — themes, plugins, settings that live in several places — and the fastest path to a good-looking site still runs through choosing a theme well. A reader who wants to describe a business and be finished this afternoon will find it heavier than the drag-and-drop options, and one who expects the site to be a long-term asset will find it worth the weight.

Ghost starts from a different premise than the rest of this category. It assumes the site is a body of writing with an audience attached, and builds outward from there: an editor that stays out of the way, a members system, and email newsletters that go out from the same place the post was published.

That integration is the argument. A consultant, a coach or a specialist trade whose marketing is genuinely their expertise gets a publication, a mailing list and a way to charge for access as one product, and the subscriber list belongs to them rather than to a marketing platform they are renting. A custom domain is included on every plan rather than gated.

It is not a general-purpose website builder, and using it as one is a mistake. There is no store, no drag-and-drop page design and no bookings, and its entry price sits above several tools that do far more of those things. For a business whose website is mostly writing it is precisely aimed; for one that needs a homepage, a services page and a contact form, it is an expensive way to get them.

Hashnode is a blogging platform with a distribution argument attached. Posts go out on your publication and also into the platform's own network feed, which is the part a new technical blog cannot manufacture on its own. Above that, the paid tier adds machinery aimed at how software writing gets found now: structured question-and-answer data, a machine-readable index file, a staleness queue and daily tracking of whether the major assistants are citing you.

The writing surface is the whole product: a technical editor or raw Markdown, with an import that takes a zip of Markdown files and maps tags, canonical addresses and publish dates across, so an existing blog arrives intact. Search settings are careful for a hosted platform — the title is stored separately from the blog name and crawler access is switchable.

The catch is that nothing establishes how far the appearance can be changed. No page read documents a theme editor, a template count or a styling surface, so design is scored at 2 on the evidence available rather than on a ceiling anyone found — and no support channel, response time or help centre appeared on any page either. What is documented instead is a fast public changelog, which says the product is alive without saying who answers the phone.

beehiiv is a newsletter product first, and its website is where the newsletter lives between sends. Posts arrive as email and stay as pages, the audience is the mailing list, and the tools around it are aimed at growing and eventually charging that audience. A custom domain works on the free tier, which puts a publication on an address its writer owns at no cost.

Beyond that the plan structure works against a small publisher. Ordinary pages — an about page, a contact page — need the third tier, so the free plan publishes posts but not much of a site around them.

The downside is the vendor mark. Removing it is reserved for the top tier, which is billed annually at a figure well above anything else in this part of the directory. A publication that wants to look like its own thing rather than a page on a platform is therefore looking at the most expensive plan on the list, and that price is itself a floor because it scales with how many subscribers are active.

Kajabi sells knowledge: courses, coaching, memberships and the site that presents them. It is a real builder rather than a wrapper — pages, a blog and scheduling all live in the same product as the checkout, so an expert running a teaching business does not have to connect four services and keep them in step.

Scheduling is included rather than being a third-party embed, which is unusual in this group and matters to anyone selling their time.

The cost is the difficulty here, in two ways. Its published rate at checkout is considerably higher than the figure widely repeated in third-party comparison tables, so a reader arriving from one of those will be surprised. And no annual rate could be established at all — the signup route for it returned nothing readable — so the only number that can honestly be quoted is a monthly one. Below the top tier the account is limited to a single website, which for anyone running more than one venture is a harder constraint than it sounds.

HubSpot Content Hub is the publishing part of a marketing suite, and the reason to choose it is what sits underneath: pages and posts attached to a customer database rather than to a separate analytics script. For a business that already runs its sales this way, the website stops being a separate system.

It clears this directory's rule on being buyable — the entry tier has a real checkout, and only the two enterprise tiers are behind a sales conversation. A custom domain works on every plan and appointments are included throughout.

The cost is in the shape of the plans. The advertised entry price is introductory, available to new customers only, and renews at nearly three times what it says — the vendor states both figures. And the entry plan caps the site at thirty pages, above which the next tier costs more than twenty times as much. That is not a step-up, it is a cliff, and a business likely to pass thirty pages should price the plan it will end up on rather than the one it starts on.

Substack collapses a blog and a mailing list into one object. A post is an email and a web page at the same time, subscribers are the audience and the list, and charging for some of that writing takes no extra setup. For a consultant or writer whose website is mostly words plus an email list, the assembly that usually takes three products takes none.

It is a real site rather than only an archive: an about page and other custom pages sit in the navigation, and a domain the writer owns can be attached for a single charge rather than a subscription.

The cost comes in two parts, and both are worth stating plainly. The platform takes a tenth of every paid subscription, permanently, on top of the payment processor's fee — which is nothing while nobody is paying and becomes the largest line item once they are. And design control is close to absent: a publication looks like the platform, with a handful of choices around a fixed shape, which is the price of the writing being the product.

Blogger is the rarest thing in this category: a product that publishes on a domain you own, with a certificate the platform creates and renews, and charges nothing for any of it. There is no rate card, no upgrade path and no plan that unlocks the thing you actually wanted. What it does, it does for everyone.

Underneath, it is a blog and only a blog. Posts and photos are stored and served by Google, the design surface is a template picker with editable layouts and background images, and revenue is meant to come from advertising rather than from you. Everything can be taken out again as a feed file, and the theme downloads separately, so nothing you write is trapped.

What you give up is everything that has happened to publishing since. There is no store, no newsletter, no audience tooling beyond visit statistics, and no documented way to reach anyone at the company — Blogger scores 1 for support because the help centre's only invitation is to leave feedback on an article. Connecting a domain means entering two CNAME records and four A-records by hand at your registrar. The product is maintained rather than developed: the blog has not posted since 2020, while the Android app and the help centre are both still being updated.