“Best-of-breed” sounds like a grown-up decision: pick the best CMS, the best form tool, the best analytics, the best email platform—then stitch them together into a beautiful marketing machine.
Sometimes that works.
But more often, “best-of-breed” quietly turns into integration-of-the-month club, where your blog stack is technically impressive and operationally exhausting. The hidden costs aren’t just dollars. They’re time, risk, and the slow creep of “we’ll fix tracking later” becoming a lifestyle.
Here’s where the real costs show up—and when consolidating onto HubSpot is usually the pragmatic move.
A typical best-of-breed setup looks like:
None of this is “bad.” The hidden cost is that you’re now the general contractor.
It’s easy to budget for monthly licenses. It’s harder to budget for:
This tax is especially visible when people change roles. The stack still works… until the one person who understood it leaves.
Reality check: Integrations are not “set it and forget it.” They’re “set it and babysit it.”
Most stacks can tell you traffic.
What they struggle with is giving you a clean, defensible answer to:
You end up with discrepancies:
HubSpot’s pitch here is straightforward: if content, conversion, automation, and CRM data live in the same system, you reduce attribution duct-tape. HubSpot supports attribution reporting (contact create, and in certain tiers deal/revenue attribution). (HubSpot Knowledge Base) It also supports campaign attribution reporting inside the campaigns tool. (HubSpot Knowledge Base)
That doesn’t make attribution perfect. It makes it less fragile.
With WordPress-style stacks, updates are part of life:
But the bigger issue isn’t whether updates exist—it’s whether your site stays consistently patched, especially across lots of plugins.
Security researchers regularly report large numbers of vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins/themes. For example, Wordfence publishes periodic vulnerability reports showing high volumes of disclosed issues in plugins/themes over short time windows. (Wordfence)
And the “long tail” problem is real: popular plugins can be patched quickly, but a meaningful portion of sites often remain on vulnerable versions after fixes are available (because updates get delayed, conflict with other plugins, or nobody owns the process). (TechRadar)
Translation: best-of-breed often means you’re running a small software supply chain. Congrats.
Each added plugin/script can affect:
Even if each tool is “best,” the combined system can become unpredictable—especially when you’re trying to move fast.
This is where teams slowly start avoiding changes because they’re afraid of breaking things. That’s when content velocity dies.
In best-of-breed stacks, the blog is in one system, forms in another, CTAs somewhere else, and workflow logic somewhere else.
You see this in:
HubSpot reduces this by keeping CTAs, forms, and automation native to the same platform:
This doesn’t automatically create good governance—but it makes it easier to enforce.
HubSpot usually wins on practicality when:
In short: if you want your blog to behave like a connected growth system—publish → convert → nurture → report—consolidation often beats customization.
Best-of-breed can be worth it when:
If you’re in one of these cases, HubSpot can still work—but you’re not choosing it primarily for “ease.”
Choose HubSpot if most of these are true:
Stick with best-of-breed if most of these are true: