When building websites, you often need a place to store data that can be displayed dynamically. Maybe displaying products, business locations, employees, or downloadable resources. But what is the best way to store this data? I recently found this presentation (HubSpot CRM Data on Websites) comparing the various methods and also discusses the new HubSpot custom objects.
Below are some of the pros and cons of each option.
Custom CRM Objects
Learn more about HubSpot custom CRM objects
- Must have an enterprise subscription $$$
- No limit of instances per object type (other than total object instances limit)
- Unified business and website data and can be used in reporting or automation.
- Authenticated API only
HubDB
- Publishing oriented property types (location, rich text, image, video)
- Isolated to the HubSpot CMS and can’t be used in reporting or automation
- No-auth public API
External relational database
- Flexibility to set up the database as you require
- Does not unify business data and can’t be used inside HubSpot or any HubSpot reporting
- Authentication can be private or public
- In order to display data on HubSpot CMS you would need to use JavaScript to get data on the front-end. If you are using WordPress you can get the data using PHP or JS.
- Requires server setup, management, and hosting.
Conclusion
If you are using HubSpot enterprise, custom objects provide a lot of benefits in keeping all of your data centralized. Plus the data can be used across other Hubs and be displayed in reporting. For public data, HubDB makes a lot of sense but external databases provide full customization with the cost of complexity and technical knowledge to set it up.
