Of the 100 companies on the Forbes Cloud 100, 53 run their homepage on a JavaScript framework rather than a packaged CMS, 16 run it on Webflow, 13 on WordPress and one on HubSpot's CMS. We checked every homepage on 20 October 2026. Across the whole web the order is the other way round: W3Techs puts WordPress on 58.3% of sites with a known CMS, Webflow on 1.2% and HubSpot CMS on 0.2%.
This page sets our check of the Cloud 100 against W3Techs share by site rank, HTTP Archive field speed by platform and two vendor surveys on how teams run their sites. Every figure carries its source and date. We build marketing sites in Webflow, so the bias is stated; the counts are what the sites' own code shows.
What the Cloud 100 run their websites on
There is no published census of B2B SaaS website platforms. BuiltWith's CMS rankings sit behind a verification wall, and W3Techs reports share by traffic rank, not by industry. So we built a sample. The Forbes Cloud 100 is a ranked list of the 100 leading private cloud companies, compiled with Bessemer Venture Partners; the 2025 list was the most recent edition on Forbes' site when we checked. Nearly all sell software to businesses. A few, such as Midjourney and Perplexity, sell mostly to consumers, and we kept them in rather than pick and choose.
Method. On 20 October 2026 we fetched each homepage and its /blog path with an ordinary browser request and read the HTML for platform fingerprints: Webflow's page attributes, WordPress's wp-content paths, Next.js build files, and the image hosts of headless CMSs such as Contentful and Sanity. Five sites refused the plain request and were read through a rendering proxy. Four, Clio, Personio, Axonius and Cato Networks, served a bot-protection page either way and are counted as not identified.
| Platform | Homepages | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Next.js, with or without a headless CMS | 48 | Notion, Stripe, Rippling, Gong, Zapier |
| Webflow | 16 | Vanta, Glean, Fivetran, Clay, Checkout.com |
| WordPress | 13 | AppsFlyer, HiBob, Motive, NinjaOne, Forter |
| Built in-house or on the company's own product | 6 | Canva, Zoho, Odoo, Hugging Face |
| Other JavaScript frameworks (Nuxt, Astro, Gatsby) | 5 | Calendly, Collibra, Databricks |
| Adobe Experience Manager | 3 | OneTrust, Celonis, Cohesity |
| Framer, HubSpot CMS, Drupal, Statamic | 1 each | Miro, Lambda, Automation Anywhere, Claroty |
| Not identified | 5 | Four behind bot protection, one custom build |
Source: Octo Agency check of the Forbes Cloud 100 2025 homepages, 20 October 2026
Two counts include the vendor's own site: Webflow runs on Webflow and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, runs on WordPress. Without them it is 15 and 12. The homepage is not the whole site, either. Help centres, docs and careers pages often run elsewhere, and we only checked the homepage and the blog.
Headless is the default at the top, and Contentful leads it
The 53 framework sites split the website in two: a front end written in code and a separate content store that editors use. The image and data hosts in the HTML show which content store most of them chose.
| Content source detected | Sites | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Contentful | 20 | Notion, Plaid, 1Password, Zapier, OpenAI |
| Sanity | 12 | Anthropic, Intercom, Gong, Airtable, Harvey |
| Storyblok | 3 | Grafana Labs, Checkr, Guild |
| Contentstack, Builder.io, Payload, Prismic, headless WordPress | 1 each | Abnormal AI, Pendo, ElevenLabs, LaunchDarkly, Talkdesk |
| None detected | 13 | Stripe, Brex, Cursor, Vercel, Calendly |
Source: Octo Agency check of the Forbes Cloud 100 2025 homepages and blogs, 20 October 2026
"None detected" does not mean no CMS. Stripe and Brex, for example, may serve content from their own systems or proxy images through their own domain, which hides the source. The hosting pattern is clearer: 32 of the 53 framework sites returned Vercel's response headers, and that is a floor, since three sites read through the proxy returned no headers.
The pattern spans the list: half of the companies founded since 2016 use it, and 32 of the 55 founded earlier. It also has a cost the counts do not show: every new page type needs a developer, because the templates live in code. The Webflow or Next.js for a Marketing Site? post on this site works through that trade.
Web-wide share against Cloud 100 share
W3Techs surveys more than 20 million sites, ranks them with Chrome UX Report and Tranco data, and reports each CMS's share of the sites where it can identify one. It counts a CMS if it finds it on any page of a site, subdomains included. The comparison below is rough, because W3Techs does not count a Next.js front end as a CMS while our sample counts every homepage, and only the homepage. It still shows how far the Cloud 100 sit from the web as a whole.
| Platform | All sites with a known CMS | Top 1,000,000 | Top 10,000 | Cloud 100 homepages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 58.3% | 48.3% | 50.5% | 13 |
| Webflow | 1.2% | 1.5% | 2.3% | 16 |
| HubSpot CMS | 0.2% | 1.0% | 1.1% | 1 |
| Drupal | 0.9% | 3.7% | 6.7% | 1 |
| Framer | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.5% | 1 |
| Sanity | Less than 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.4% | 12, as a headless source |
Sources: W3Techs content management overview and ranking breakdowns, 20 October 2026; Octo Agency check, 20 October 2026
Three things stand out. Webflow appears among funded SaaS companies at many times its web-wide share. WordPress is under-represented by about four times, although it still runs one homepage in eight. Drupal, which W3Techs shows rising to 6.7% of the top 10,000, appears once, at Automation Anywhere, so its high-rank share comes from outside SaaS. Our Webflow Statistics 2026 post has Webflow's full share history; this table adds the SaaS cut.
HubSpot runs the CRM, rarely the website
HubSpot's CMS is rare everywhere: 0.2% of sites with a known CMS, rising to 1.0% of the top million and 1.1% of the top 10,000 (W3Techs, 20 October 2026). In the Cloud 100 it runs one homepage, Lambda's, and one other company's blog, Brightwheel's.
HubSpot as a CRM is another matter. Its tracking or forms scripts appear in the homepage HTML of 14 Cloud 100 sites: six on Webflow, four on WordPress and four on framework sites. That is a floor, because scripts loaded through a tag manager do not appear in the HTML. The common B2B SaaS stack pairs HubSpot as CRM with a separate website platform, and the joint that breaks is the form. Our Webflow vs HubSpot CMS post covers where that connection fails and what each costs.
Younger companies pick Webflow, older ones kept WordPress
Forbes records a founding year for 91 of the 100 companies. Split at 2016, the platform choice changes sharply.
| Founded | Companies | Webflow | WordPress | JavaScript framework | Other or not identified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 or later | 36 | 11 | 2 | 18 | 5 |
| Before 2016 | 55 | 3 | 10 | 32 | 10 |
Sources: Forbes Cloud 100 2025 founding years; Octo Agency check, 20 October 2026
Nearly a third of the younger companies run Webflow, including Vanta, Glean, Clay and Synthesia. Among the older ones, Webflow appears three times, once on Webflow's own site. WordPress follows the opposite pattern: ten of its 13 sites belong to companies founded before 2016. The likely reading is migration cost. A company that built on WordPress in 2012 and has 3,000 posts and a plugin stack does not move lightly; a company founding its site in 2019 picked from a different shortlist.
Blogs often run elsewhere. Eight of the companies we could read run their blog on a different platform from their homepage. Grammarly, Miro, Postman, ClickUp and Workato serve blogs from WordPress behind a framework or Framer homepage; Airtable and BrowserStack use Ghost; Brightwheel uses HubSpot. A migration plan that covers only the marketing pages misses this second system.
Field speed by platform in the top million
The HTTP Archive pairs Chrome's real-user data with technology detection. An origin passes when at least 75% of real visits are good on loading, responsiveness and layout stability. The top-million cut is the closest public proxy for sites with real traffic.
| Platform | Top 1M origins measured | Top 1M pass rate | All origins pass rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drupal | 11,658 | 58.6% | 64.7% |
| Astro | 3,087 | 54.5% | 71.1% |
| WordPress | 110,537 | 50.1% | 48.3% |
| Webflow | 2,635 | 49.8% | 71.3% |
| HubSpot CMS Hub | 704 | 45.2% | 60.0% |
| Storyblok | 882 | 44.4% | 53.0% |
| Framer Sites | 359 | 42.3% | 70.8% |
| Sanity | 1,043 | 35.3% | 52.4% |
| Adobe Experience Manager | 4,542 | 33.2% | 33.9% |
| Contentful | 2,259 | 28.0% | 38.1% |
| Next.js | 39,764 | 25.5% | 35.7% |
Source: HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report, September 2026 dataset, read through the report API on 20 October 2026
Every platform except WordPress passes less often in the top million than across all origins, because busier sites carry more scripts, tags and media. The gap between groups is the useful part. Drupal, WordPress, Webflow, HubSpot and Framer sit between 42% and 59%; the stacks the Cloud 100 favour, Next.js with Contentful or Sanity, sit between 25% and 36%. Astro, a framework designed to ship little JavaScript, is the exception at 54.5%.
The HTTP Archive's Web Almanac 2025, published in January 2026, found the same order as the all-origins column in lab tests: Webflow's median mobile Lighthouse performance score was 58 against WordPress's 41.
Who owns the website: the survey data
Platform choice is also an ownership choice. Webflow's 2026 State of the Website report, a vendor-commissioned survey run by Vanson Bourne in June and July 2025, asked 1,000 director-level marketing and technical leaders at organisations with at least 50 staff in the US, UK and Canada. IT and tech was the largest industry group, at 29.2%.
| Answer | Marketing leaders | Technical leaders |
|---|---|---|
| "My team owns website strategy" | 97% | 94% |
| Website leans more marketing controlled | 61% | 33% |
| Control is balanced | 35% | 50% |
| Website leans more engineering controlled | 4% | 17% |
Source: Webflow, The 2026 State of the Website, collaboration chapter, survey June to July 2025
Both sides claim the website. In the same survey, 91% of technical leaders report friction with non-technical teams when the site changes, 92% of organisations say update requests are growing in size and complexity, and 97% of technical leaders say technical debt affects how well they manage the site. Only 47% of leaders are completely confident their infrastructure can support fast change without new security risk. Read these as a vendor's framing of a real problem: Webflow sells the marketer-owned model.
Storyblok, a headless CMS vendor, surveyed 1,300 CMS users for its State of CMS 2025, released in May 2025. It found 61% of teams run two or more CMSs and 50% are trying other CMSs. Its analysis of 7,374 US job listings put the average marketer salary at $101,270 where a modern headless CMS is named, against $54,625 for legacy systems. That is a correlation in job ads, not a pay rise from switching.
What this means for a B2B SaaS site: a five-page platform test
The Cloud 100 show three working models: a framework with a headless CMS, run by engineers; Webflow, run largely by marketing; and WordPress, kept by companies that started on it. Our sample says nothing direct about a SaaS company of 50 people, and the field data says the headless route needs the most deliberate performance work.
Before committing, we would rebuild five pages on the candidate platform and judge the platform on them, not on a demo.
1. Homepage. The heaviest page, with the most scripts. Measure mobile Core Web Vitals once the real tag stack is loaded, against the 49.8% to 50.1% top-million base rate for Webflow and WordPress.
2. Pricing. Tables, toggles and plan logic. Check whether a marketer can change a price without a ticket.
3. One product or feature template. The page type you will repeat thirty times. Time how long a second copy takes from the template.
4. A blog post from the CMS. Import 50 real posts, because eight of the Cloud 100 run their blog on a second system and a migration has to decide whether to merge it.
5. Demo request. The form and its CRM connection, tested end to end with a tagged ad click. Our Demo Request Conversion Rates 2026 post has the form benchmarks.
In our own work, as a white-label partner to Web Tonic, we built more than 20 Webflow sites in twelve months at two to three weeks each, and the largest CMS held over 1,200 items. We build applications in Next.js when a project needs one, and we quote each build per project. Our marketing websites service page explains how we scope a B2B SaaS site.
