You can consider switches to be routers in the sense that traffic is routed to each individual port rather than all traffic is echoed to all ports as is done in a hub.
Therefor, switches are more secure than hubs in the sense that one port cannot see traffic for another port unless the switch allows. Some switches come with ports just so one can monitor all traffic.
As to performance, switches have better performance than hubs in all ways save maybe one: hubs may be a few millisecs faster, latency-wise, than a switch as they simply echo all traffic to all ports. The switches take a few millisecs (maybe billionths of a sec?) to process what traffic goes to what port.
Switches are also more or less immune to race conditions, such as found when using a hub. Say the hub has many networked gamers using it. The gamers start to see their pings all increasing till they max out the time limit in the game. This is a very common condition in hubs, but really never occurs in any other traffic load than fast/small/duplex traffic. Just using a hub to go online for browsing, or as a link to some low traffic servers should be ok.
Just some thoughts for you.