How to Compare Sydney Agencies for HubSpot, Umbraco and SharePoint Projects

Three proposals land in your inbox. All three list the same platform logos, all three promise discovery and UX and integration, and all three are priced closely enough that the difference feels like a vibe rather than a decision. That's where most enterprise buyers get stuck, and generic agency-selection advice won't rescue you, because what separates these three is platform-specific.

So this isn't a ranked list of Sydney agencies. It's a set of criteria you can run across the shortlist you already have, tuned to the three platforms this article covers: HubSpot CMS, Umbraco and SharePoint on Microsoft 365. What counts as depth differs on each, and no capability deck will tell you which. Nobody makes this call with complete information. The realistic goal isn't finding the objectively best agency, it's avoiding the one whose weak spot lines up with your project's hardest part.

Key Takeaways

• Partner tiers are real evidence of committed investment, but they say nothing about fit. Ask what the tier was earned for and who earned it.
• The platform changes the risk. On HubSpot the risk is coupling to the CRM, on Umbraco it's the content model and the upgrade path, on SharePoint it's permissions and governance.
• SharePoint is the easiest of the three to underestimate, because an intranet isn't a website with a login.
• Ask for named certified developers and comparable projects, not headcount.
• If a proposal can't tell you which system is the source of truth for each field, integration hasn't been designed yet.

Partner Tiers: Useful, and Widely Over-Read

Every shortlist arrives with badges attached. Gold this, certified that. They aren't meaningless: tiers generally reflect some combination of sustained revenue, certified staff and delivery volume, so the agency has put money and training hours behind the platform rather than adding it to a list because a client asked. What a tier can't tell you is fit. Two questions cut through it.

First: what was the tier earned for? Certification on a marketing platform can come from marketing work rather than development work. Both are legitimate. Neither proves the team can build the thing you're buying.

Second: who holds the certifications, and will they be on your project? Ask how many certified developers are on staff for that platform, then which of them are assigned. Six is a different proposition from one certified architect and a bench of generalists. Get it in writing, because "our team is certified" and "your team is certified" aren't the same sentence.

What Changes by Platform

Here's the part generic selection guides skip. The questions should change depending on the platform.

HubSpot CMS: the risk is in the coupling

HubSpot's appeal is that the site and the customer data live in the same place. Marketing automation, forms, personalisation and the CRM all sit together, which is genuinely powerful and also the thing that goes wrong.

Ask how they'd structure templates and modules so marketers can build pages without raising a ticket. That's the whole promise of the platform, and it's entirely possible to build a HubSpot site so rigid that editors end up emailing the agency for a heading change. Ask to see the module inventory, and whether a non-developer could assemble a landing page from it.

Then ask about the data. Which properties do forms write to? What happens when the same person submits twice? Who owns the workflow logic, your ops team or theirs? Scale matters too. Moving a large estate onto HubSpot CMS is a different exercise from building a thirty-page site, and a proposal built on the latter won't necessarily say so.

Umbraco: the risk is in the content model

Umbraco is open source, MIT licensed and built on .NET, so there's no licence fee and it draws on a widely used development stack. That's an advantage and a hazard at once, because anyone who writes C# can plausibly describe themselves as an Umbraco developer.

The separator is document types. Ask them to sketch, roughly, how they'd model your content: what's a real content type, what's structured data versus a rich text blob, what gets reused. A team that reaches for that conversation early is thinking about the editing experience. A team that says it'll be worked out during the build is deferring the decision that shapes that experience for years.

Ask about upgrades too. Umbraco ships two major versions a year, with every fourth major a long-term-support release, and careless custom code turns a routine upgrade into a project. Ask who upgraded what, and how it went. And if you're coming off a licensed platform, ask them to be honest about what you give up, because Umbraco isn't automatically the right answer for every brief.

SharePoint and Microsoft 365: the least-understood brief on the list

This is where the scrutiny belongs, because it is the brief least like a website build.

A SharePoint intranet isn't a website with a login. A public site is a shopfront. An intranet is a warehouse, and nobody is impressed by a beautifully branded warehouse where the forklift can't find anything. The audience is captive rather than acquired, so you can't fix low engagement with more traffic, and much of the hard work sits outside what a website build normally covers: architecture across hubs, metadata, search configuration, retention, and permissions inherited from whatever your organisation did to its tenant over the last decade.

Questions worth asking on a SharePoint or extranet brief:

• What's in-platform and what's custom? A good partner tells you where an out-of-the-box web part will do rather than quoting to rebuild it.
• How will search actually work? Findability is what users judge an intranet on, and search on a large tenant is configured, not installed.
• Who does the permissions work, and when? Not at the end. Permissions and governance shape the architecture, so they belong in discovery.
• What happens to it in six months? An intranet with no owner and no plan for dead documents decays quickly.
• Can they handle multi-entity structures, where several divisions need shared components under their own branding?

That permissions question got sharper when Microsoft 365 Copilot arrived. Copilot is scoped to content the signed-in user already has permission to see, which sounds reassuring until you count the over-shared libraries nobody has audited in a decade. Oversharing that was hidden by the fact nobody could find anything becomes a retrieval problem the moment an assistant can find everything. If a rollout is on your roadmap, treat permissions hygiene as part of the intranet project rather than a later clean-up, and ask your shortlist whether they've done Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness work before. Nobody should be claiming this is a solved problem, Webcoda included, so an agency projecting total certainty about it deserves one more question.

Government buyers, one more. The Digital Service Standard has applied to new and replacement staff-facing services since 1 July 2024, and from 1 January 2025 it sits within the Digital Experience Policy alongside the Digital Inclusion Standard, which carries the accessibility criteria. A new government intranet is therefore inside mandatory scope. Establish which WCAG version you're being quoted against: the standard no longer pins a version number and requires the latest, which is WCAG 2.2 at Level AA, while older policy documents and existing contracts still cite 2.1.

UX Capability: Research or Decoration?

Every proposal claims UX. The useful test is what the agency did before anything was designed, and what changed as a result. Ask for the artefacts: surveys, stakeholder interviews, user testing, journey maps, a card sort for the navigation. Then the better question. Name a finding from that research that changed the design. If nobody can, the research was theatre. Real discovery produces at least one uncomfortable moment where the client's assumption loses.

On intranets, insist on workshops with actual staff, not just the sponsor. The sponsor knows what the intranet is supposed to do. Staff know what they do instead, which is what you're trying to change.

Integration: Name the Source of Truth

Integration is where proposals get vague and budgets get eaten. The fastest test: for each connected system, which one is the source of truth for each field, what triggers a sync, and what happens when it fails at 2am?

Ask what they've actually connected, not what they could connect. Website to CRM is a common shape, and it carries familiar traps: duplicate contacts, mismatched field types, submissions that vanish into a workflow nobody owns. Ask who monitors it after launch. Systems integration nobody watches is a future outage with a longer fuse.

Reading Three Proposals Side by Side

Got three in front of you? Score each on platform depth (certified people, comparable projects), UX evidence (artefacts, plus a finding that changed something), integration specificity (named systems, named source of truth), and fit: are they curious about your constraints, or reciting a method?

Then look for the proposal that admitted something. That a feature wasn't worth building, that an out-of-the-box component would do, that your timeline was optimistic. Agreement is cheap during a sales process. Willingness to argue is the best available proxy for what working together will actually feel like.

And be honest about the stakes. You'll live with this platform for years, probably longer than several people in the evaluation meeting will stay in their roles. That's an argument for weighting editability and governance above whichever demo looked best on the day.

Where Webcoda Fits

Webcoda is a Surry Hills agency, founded in 2005, and builds on all three of these platforms. Webcoda's published credentials: Umbraco Gold Partner and Gold Contributing Partner for 2025, with six certified Umbraco developers and 50+ projects over 12+ years; HubSpot Solutions Partner at Gold tier, 18 certifications and five certified HubSpot developers; and SharePoint intranet development with Microsoft 365 integration as a named specialism.

The MA Financial Group intranet began with UX discovery workshops before SharePoint was extended for the firm's needs. The NSW Justice Health intranet covers a searchable staff directory, a media hub and a policy knowledge hub, which is the shape a lot of intranet and extranet work takes. On HubSpot, UTS College was a 1,400-page migration with templates and modules rebuilt for non-developer editing. On Umbraco, JMC Academy involved deep UX discovery and a Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration, and moved the institution off a costly CMS onto open source with significant savings.

Talk to Webcoda

Webcoda is a Sydney-based, B Corp certified digital agency that has been building websites and enterprise web applications since 2005, for organisations including Sony, BridgeClimb, the Australian Federal Government and NSW Health. We are an Umbraco Gold Partner, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico and a HubSpot Solutions Partner, so platform advice comes without a single-vendor agenda.

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