Web designers and developers often end up doing the same tasks over and over again. Things like setting up hosting, building a CSS style guide, implementing classes, and formatting HTML all need to be sorted out before initial deployment and launch. Pretty tedious, right?
Right.
Now imagine a tool that gets rid of all that and still gives you the power to build a fully customized website as if you were coding it from scratch. That’s where Webflow comes in.
Webflow is a website builder that works the same way as many others do—it has a visual canvas tool that lets you combine various design elements into a great looking site without ever having to write code. The difference is, Webflow gives you full control of that code before, during, and after your site goes live.
This is huge for anybody who wants a finely tuned site without doing all of the dirty work.
Webflow Compared to the Best Website Builders
Webflow is a great tool for web designers and developers looking to build websites the same way they’ve always done, only with half the hassle and twice the automation. Like many website builders, it has a drag-and-drop editor and templates to get you started, but what really makes it shine is the level of control it gives you—which is perhaps the most for any platform of its kind.
To export a site’s code you now need a paid workspace (Core, Growth, or the Freelancer/Agency workspaces), but once you have that in place you can export the HTML, CSS, and assets, make custom edits, hand them to developers, or move the project into another workspace. You can still build and host sites on individual site plans as before—exporting is just tied to the workspace rather than the very first paid site plan.
Of course, if your website or business doesn’t need that depth of control, you might find some of the following alternatives from our list of top website builders to be more suitable.
Squarespace is our first choice for creating beautiful, content-focused websites without the need for web development experience. Sign up today for a 14-day trial of Squarespace.
Weebly still has one of the better truly free plans if you don’t mind Square/Weebly branding, which makes it an easy no-budget option. Sign up for Weebly completely free.
Wix is a great all-around website builder with tons of functionality and themes that don’t require any coding or design experience. You can start building on the free plan and upgrade later—there’s also a 14-day money-back window on paid plans. Start on Wix for free today.
WordPress is the blogger and content creator’s standard for highly-flexible website development. If you’re looking for a platform to build a website from scratch, WordPress is a great option. Give WordPress a try for free.
Webflow: The Good and the Bad
We can’t stress enough how customizable Webflow is, nor how powerful that makes it for advanced developers. You can modify the underlying code until themes look exactly the way you want them to, and you can confidently add animations and integrations while Webflow takes care of both the basics and the complexities on the backend.
That said, being able to use all of Webflow’s capabilities may require a lot of experience, otherwise you could face a steep learning curve whenever you run into problems. Either way, if you’re looking for a website builder that gives you full control from day one, Webflow is hard to beat.
What Webflow Is Good At
Great for web developers and designers: Webflow allows you to create websites on a visual builder while still providing total design freedom. This no-code setup is similar to how actual web designers and developers construct websites. You can tweak padding, button classes, layouts, and other formatting options just like you would when editing CSS.
After assembling each page, you can still manually edit or export the code—but exporting now lives on a paid workspace plan rather than the individual site plan. That setup lets agencies keep one workspace with export rights while running multiple hosted sites elsewhere. You still get the speed of a visual builder and the flexibility of hardcoding.
Another exciting feature is that you can even use Webflow to create what you want and then export and migrate the code to content management systems like WordPress or ecommerce platforms like Shopify. Just remember that exported sites won’t bring along CMS collection editing or Webflow’s native forms—you’ll need to recreate those parts on the destination platform.
Eliminates the basics: One of the best things about Webflow is how it handles the mundane web creation tasks for you. Security, maintenance, hosting, and deployment are all taken care of automatically. This allows you to focus on designing and maintaining the website itself without having to double-check that everything else is still working.
Webflow also makes it straightforward to build and deploy a system of designs across your entire site simply by choosing the class for each asset. The visual canvas and intuitive drag-and-drop interface make it super easy to create and update your brand’s style everywhere.
The responsiveness of Webflow is a joy to work with as well. Design decisions cascade up and down from desktop, meaning changes made there can be reflected on both tablet and mobile. Meanwhile, tweaks at the tablet level will only impact tablet and mobile. Since each breakpoint is editable separately, you can easily craft unique looks on any device.
Another time-saving functionality is how much of a breeze it is to implement user registrations and gated content. Webflow’s visual editor has built-in components and ecommerce plans that support up to 20,000 paid user accounts, so you don’t have to code membership logic from scratch—though you still can if you want to.
Good for moving pieces: With a high degree of control over the actual code, Webflow makes it easy to develop compelling CSS animations and JavaScript interactions.
It has a variety of built-in triggers that can be added to any element, including effects like pop, jiggle, bounce, shrink, flip, and fade. And remember, you don’t have to be a coding expert to add these dynamic effects, nor to customize them.
For example, with just one or two clicks, animations and interactions can be configured to trigger only on certain devices, because maybe you want an animation that runs on desktop but not on mobile.
We also found the animation workflow to be quite intuitive, and that’s helpful because integrating multi-step animations can sometimes dramatically improve the visual appeal of websites. Simple things like fading in content when scrolling or adding hover animations to buttons can make the site feel more polished.
Helpful resources: Webflow offers a wealth of tutorials, templates, community support, and access to experts when you need it. For example, users can access an incredible set of tutorials via Webflow University—an online library of courses and lessons to learn everything you need to improve your web building skills.
Since the learning curve can be steep on Webflow, access to help is invaluable. The Made in Webflow section even contains many clonable projects that already incorporate design best practices and creative implementations, which can serve as excellent starting points for ecommerce and portfolio sites, for example.
Additionally, Webflow has a strong partner network of experts in 3D design, animation, third-party integrations, web design, web development, graphic design, and anything else you might need to construct your website. Tapping into this can be a game-changer.
Webflow also has a robust creator community with livestreams, podcasts, events, and a forum for asking questions. We found the community to be friendly, helpful, and responsive when seeking advice.
Great for SEO: Webflow provides comprehensive SEO tools right in the visual editor.
This includes the ability to edit and insert schema markup, define meta titles and descriptions, control indexing and sitemaps, manage 301 redirects, and edit image alt tags. We found that Webflow sites required very little additional SEO work beyond defining metadata and alt text.
The platform’s infrastructure is hosted on enterprise-grade cloud hosting with automatic scaling and 99.99% uptime, which allows for speed, scalability, and security to help your site achieve a high score on Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Perhaps most importantly, Webflow generates clean HTML and CSS code under the hood. This means your sites will spit out semantic, optimized code that search engines can easily crawl and index, so you won’t have to worry about messy spaghetti code hurting your rankings.
With Webflow’s SEO features, high-performance hosting, and semantically sound code, it ticks all the boxes for developing sites that will rank highly in search engines.
Solid templates to get you started: If you don’t have web development experience, Webflow offers templates for everything from ecommerce stores and blogs to portfolios and business marketing sites.
The majority of premium templates available on Webflow are created by highly skilled Webflow users. Although you do have to purchase these, the prices are still relatively inexpensive in most cases, often under $80, and you can filter by industry and layout.
Once you’ve purchased a template, Webflow’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to tailor the design for your brand. You can modify images, text, colors, and layouts to transform the template into your own unique look.
By combining a user-friendly editor with a template marketplace spanning many industries and use cases, Webflow provides a running start for anyone new to web design and development.
Figma integration: One of the most popular tools in website design today is Figma, a collaborative design platform. Webflow has a direct Figma integration that allows you to import your Figma designs straight into Webflow, which then automatically converts them into HTML and CSS within your workspace.
This integration does it all. It recreates layouts based on your Figma document, imports typography styles, establishes border and shadow settings, brings in background images and gradients, converts vectors and shapes into SVGs, incorporates images with opacity, and it designates absolute positioning.
In our experience, the integration worked incredibly well. Our layouts were transferred onto Webflow with near pixel-perfection. Plus it saved us an immense amount of time by applying styles and layouts automatically rather than having to recreate everything manually. Being able to move seamlessly from Figma to Webflow truly bridges the gap between design and development.
Marketing logic automation: With built-in logic automation, Webflow can seamlessly connect your website to your CMS, CRM, email marketing, and other platforms.
For example, you can automatically route leads to the appropriate sales reps or add email signups to a particular campaign list right within your workspace. All you have to do is set up a trigger in Webflow, define conditions or criteria for that trigger, and then select the action you want the trigger to execute.
Triggers can be anything from a form submission, to a button click, to a custom event. The actions can integrate with hundreds of marketing, sales, and email services via Zapier.
We found the automation incredibly useful for connecting our Webflow site to our marketing stack. As soon as someone fills out a contact form, it automatically creates a new lead in our CRM, so email signups get added to campaigns without any manual input.
Once again, Webflow’s no-coding-unless-you-want-to approach pays dividends, this time allowing you to create sophisticated multi-step workflows for nurturing prospects and customers through your website’s funnel.
Webflow’s Potential Drawbacks
It’s not exactly like coding a website: Although Webflow allows you to construct websites visually as if you were writing code, there are still some constraints compared to actually coding a site from scratch.
For example, Webflow’s versioning system still lacks full Git-style version control. Enterprise workspaces can use page branching so multiple designers can work on separate pages, and Webflow has rolled out real-time collaboration on pages, but it’s still not the same as a full local dev workflow.
You also can’t completely remove certain elements from the Document Object Model automatically—hiding them visually leaves them in the code. For optimizing page speed, it’s better to delete unnecessary elements entirely.
Technical limitations: While Webflow is terrific on the soft side of things, you may run into a few hurdles on the hard side. For example, if you want to export and self-host forms, you’ll have to use a third-party form vendor with Webflow. Once exported, dynamic CMS content and native form handling don’t follow you—you’ll need to rebuild that externally.
Additionally, Webflow still has a limit of 150 static pages per site on most site plans. You can add more dynamic pages like blogs that pull content from a database, but the number of distinct static pages is capped. If you’ve got a site that needs a ton of pages, you may be out of luck unless you go enterprise or split the project.
While these limitations likely won’t impact most users, they illustrate how Webflow isn’t a complete substitute for coding complex, large-scale sites.
Collaboration still isn’t perfect: Webflow now supports real-time collaboration on pages and lets workspaces invite freelancer or agency guests, but design-level edits can still bump into conflicts and the most powerful branching features remain enterprise-only. Agencies with lots of designers may still prefer a traditional Git-based workflow.
Not ideal for blogging or ecommerce: Webflow’s CMS is strong, but scaling a high-traffic, highly-templatized blog can still get expensive because CMS items, bandwidth, and editors are tiered. On the ecommerce side, Webflow has added automatic tax calculation, Apple Pay/web payments, and higher item limits, but it’s still lighter than a dedicated platform like Shopify for things like native POS, deep discount logic, and very large catalogs.
Limited customer support: Webflow provides email-based support across plans and aims to respond within 48 hours. There’s no phone support, and more complex development questions are still redirected to community and partner resources.
Webflow Plans and Pricing
Webflow has an interesting pricing model, with separate plans for the site you’re building and the workspace you’re using. Both have free tiers allowing you to get started right away and figure out what you need later.
In order to host what you’re building on Webflow, you’ll need a site plan. You’ll pay per website for this, and you can upgrade to higher tiers for premium features like custom domains, unlimited form submissions, and higher CMS/bandwidth limits. There are also separate tiers for building ecommerce websites.
In order to collaborate on the sites you’re building, you’ll need a workspace plan. The paid tiers for this product are designed to give you additional permissions like more staging sites, code export, and better role management, with separate tiers for in-house teams and for freelancers & agencies.
While it may be confusing at first, having separate tiers for each plan type allows you to mix and match things depending on what you’re looking to build and how you’re looking to build it.
Site Plans
Webflow has several site plans designed for building business sites, portfolios, blogs, and other content-focused websites. Each plan is for one site.
The Starter plan is free and meant for getting the hang of Webflow. It lets you publish two small staging sites on webflow.io domains, create up to two pages on each, and store up to 50 CMS items and 50 form submissions. You can’t connect a custom domain on this plan and it displays a “Made in Webflow” badge.
All paid site plans remove Webflow branding, unlock password protection, and allow up to 150 static pages (with higher traffic and CMS limits depending on the tier).
The Basic plan is billed at $14 per month if paid annually (or $18 monthly). This plan is for hosting a simple website with no CMS items. It includes a custom domain, unlimited form submissions, and 10GB of monthly bandwidth.
The CMS plan costs $23 per month when paid annually (about $28–$29 monthly). This plan is great for blogs and content sites, as it includes a custom domain, 2,000 CMS items, site search, three Editor users, unlimited form submissions, and 50GB of bandwidth.
The Business plan is $39 per month when paid annually (or $49 month-to-month). It’s made for highly trafficked marketing sites, and it includes 10,000 CMS items, 10 Editor users, file uploads from visitors, and 400GB of bandwidth—with optional add-ons if you need even more.
Webflow offers even more benefits and higher limits at the enterprise level for high-ticket users, though you’ll have to get in touch with Webflow to find out the price for your custom plan.
Ecommerce Site Plans
Webflow has ecommerce-specific site plans that unlock key features tailored for online stores and webshops. The higher ecommerce tiers add crucial functionality like 0% Webflow transaction fees, more staff accounts, and higher product limits.
The Standard plan comes with all the CMS plan features and includes 500 ecommerce items, 2,000 CMS items, automatic tax calculation, and a 2% Webflow transaction fee for $29 per month billed annually, or $42 per month billed monthly.
The Plus plan comes with all Business plan features and includes 5,000 ecommerce items, 10,000 CMS items, up to 10 staff accounts, and 0% Webflow transaction fees for $74 per month when billed annually, or $84 per month when billed monthly.
The Advanced plan also builds on top of the Business plan, giving you 15,000 ecommerce items, 10,000 CMS items, up to 15 staff accounts, and no transaction fees for $212 per month annually, or $235 per month when paid monthly.
Altogether, we find that the Plus plan provides ample features and enough inventory for a moderately-sized online store, while the Advanced plan is better suited for those with a large product catalog or complex merchandising.
In-House Workspace Plans
Webflow’s workspaces provide scaled pricing based on team size, the number of starter sites, and other permissions. Higher-tier plans unlock advanced collaboration features and are billed per organization rather than per website. You can have multiple sites on each workspace.
The free workspace includes one seat, two webflow.io staging sites (two pages each), and two free agency/freelancer guest teams.
The Core tier costs $19 per month billed annually or $28 month-to-month and is meant for teams that want enhanced staging plus code export. It comes with one full seat, 10 webflow.io staging sites (up to 300 pages each), custom code, shared libraries, and guest access.
The Growth tier is $49 per month annually or $60 monthly. This plan is good for growing teams that need unlimited staging sites and more granular access controls, publishing permissions, and site-level roles.
The Enterprise tier requires custom pricing, but comes with more seats, advanced security and performance, customer success, and page branching for parallel work.
Freelancer & Agency Workspace Plans
Webflow’s workspace plans for freelancers and agencies are made for collaborating with clients and managing CMS on non-hosted sites.
The free tier includes one seat, two non-hosted sites on webflow.io domains, and two guest teams.
The Freelancer workspace is $16 per month when billed annually (or $24 month-to-month). It includes one full seat, 10 staging sites, full CMS access on staging sites, and free access as a guest on client workspaces.
The Agency workspace runs $35 per month billed annually (or $42 month-to-month). It provides one full seat, unlimited staging sites, full CMS access on staging, more advanced roles and permissions, and the ability to invite up to two guest teams without counting them against your team size.
Keep in mind that although both of these paid tiers have the same general CMS limits for items, collections, fields, and references, only the Agency plan lets you run unlimited staging sites.
Final Thoughts
If you’re a web designer or developer looking to save time and effort but still want the option to control almost any aspect of your work, there’s nothing on the market quite like Webflow. You can rely on its drag-and-drop editor to build a website with beautiful animations and integrations, or you can export the code (with the right workspace) and customize its templates yourself.
While there are limitations to how deep the no-code-necessary rabbit hole goes, Webflow is an excellent tool that takes a solid stab at giving you the best of both worlds. If you happen to only want the best of one of those worlds, check out our list of top website builders and see which platform is right for you.
