Webflow vs. Framer. Expert's analysis.

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Webflow vs Framer: General comparison.

Let’s first go over the general comparison of Webflow vs Framer which will cover their primary benefits and drawbacks.

Both Webflow and Framer are visual builders for websites, best tools on the market
Currently, Webflow has more websites built on their platform due to a longer time spent on the market. Webflow have around 720,000+ websites built, while Framer is at 70,000+.
Webflow has 7 site plans in total, plus 2 for localization and enterprise solutions, while Framer offers 3 site plans.
Both offer collaborative (team) plans, while Webflow offers 7 different variations of those plans, split between in-house teams and freelancers/agencies.
For the learning curve, Framer offers only a community page with several on-site resources, while Webflow offers Webflow Academy, Forum, Libraries, Youtube channel, Marketplace, Apps, and more.
They are both innovative tools, but Framers has already integrated AI functionality, while Webflow has only announced it for now.

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For whom is Webflow made for?

Marketing teams

This is something Webflow is pushing a lot because of its robust CMS that gives them full control of the website, without engaging with developers at all thanks to their user-friendly, visual, interface.

Businesses in need of full-service solutions

It's perfect for businesses that need an all-in-one solution. Especially because it’s not just a “design” tool, it supports entire web development, a full cycle from design to deployment.

Freelancers and agencies

Those delivering professional-grade websites for clients will benefit from Webflow’s powerful design capabilities combined with its extensive functionality, including SEO tools and client-friendly features.

Startups and growing business

For businesses that need both visually appealing and high-performing websites, Webflow offers the perfect balance. Its design flexibility paired with robust backend capabilities makes it suitable for dynamic, scalable web projects.

Who should use Framer?

Small teams and freelancers

It’s perfect for small teams and individual designers who want to create high-fidelity prototypes and visually stunning websites. Their focus on design and interactions makes it ideal for their purposes.

Small businesses

Small businesses looking to establish online presence with beautiful websites, Framer offers tools to create visually stunning websites with modern interactions.

Design-first projects

If the primary goal is to create a visually attractive and interactive website, Framer’s design-first approach will make that happen in detail.

Interface overview

The best thing about Framer is that it reminds you of design tools that designers use on their everyday basis. Which leads to a conclusion that Framer is designer oriented, while Webflow is more of a development tool.

Framer has a lot of functionalities and it’s not only made for designers, there is a wide range of solutions for non-designers as well with various possibilities.

With all that in mind I wouldn’t say that Framer is hard to learn, especially for designers due to its similarity with design tools like Figma, but it might be tricky for non designers, especially due to lack of resources to learn from.

To be fully objective, Webflow is much harder to learn due to its complexity compared to Framer. But Webflow offers a much higher level of customization, which also means that you need to dive deeper to achieve the same results with an option to create more complex solutions.

Webflow’s interface itself looks way more complex than Framer’s, which tells you enough regarding customization options.

One of the main interface differences is that Webflow’s options are aligned on the sides, while Framer’s mostly fly around. Framer don’t use classes, which means that you can’t reuse the same elements and will have to manually change things around that can be time consuming.

Another big difference are components, in Webflow you can just create one component with all states and animations, but in Framer you need to create a separate component for each state. Which means that you need to have multiple components for one button, so that you can add hover, pressed, and other states.

Not to mention that in Framer animations are limited which can be a downside compared to Webflow where you can customize animations as you like.

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CMS capabilities

Both Webflow and Framer have quite similar CMS capabilities, they can both create a new collection and start adding items to it.

By default, when creating a CMS, you have a title, slug, and content but you can further customize your collection by adding more fields such as plain text, formatted text, link, image, color, toggle, option, file, and more.

The main difference between these two platforms in CMS is the number of collection fields, which is slightly bigger in Webflow and that Webflow offers more complex fields like reference and multi-reference, that allows you to reference other collections.

This results in a more powerful CMS collection, improved user experience and better website functionality.

Pricing plans

Pricing plans are always complex to break down and we have a separate blog post regarding this topic, make sure to check it out. Webflow pricing is complex and you have to know that is not the most affordable option among website builders.

To build a website in Webflow is free, but you cannot do much with a free plan. Moreover, plans are divided into Site plans and Workspace plans. Webflow does allow you to host a website there and publish it on their domain but you’ll need a plan if you want to publish it on a custom one.

To host a website in Webflow you’ll need a Site plan, which is further divided into General and Ecommerce plan. If you have more people working on a project or multiple projects, you’ll need a Workspace plan, which is divided into plans for in-house teams and for freelancers and agencies. They are also charged “per seat” which means that you’ll need to pay them per person that works on it.

Like Webflow, Framer also divided its plans to Site and Team pricing and you can use most of its features for free but some essential options are locked. If you’re working alone and need to publish a site, you can pick one of the three options — Mini, Basic, and Pro.Here is plans breakdown.

Mini plan:

$5 a month
For a landing page + 404 page
Custom domain
Up to 1,000 visitors a month

Basic plan:

$15 a month per site
For personal sites
Unlimited pages
10-page search limit
1 CMS collection
Up to 10,000 visitors a month

Pro plan:

$30 a month per site
For bigger sites
Access to analytics
Staging options
Redirects capabilities
10 CMS collections
300 page search limit
200,000 visitors/m

For teams, you can choose between Team Basic and Team Pro.

Team basic:

Live collaboration
Comments
Up to 5 editors (1st is free)
1 GB of file storage
7-day version history

Team pro:

All from Team Basic
Project permissions
Up to 10 editors (1st is free)
10 GB file storage
30-day version history

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Side-by-side comparison of pricing plans

The most expensive pricing option for Webflow is Enterprise plan, which is a custom solution and there is no price limit to that, which is the same as for a Business plan for Framer and therefore we can’t compare them.

Besides that, the highest priced Webflow’s plan is called Business and costs $39 per month, while Frame’s highest paid plan is called Pro and costs $30 per month. Both paid annually, while monthly plans are $49 per month for Webflow and $40 per month for Framer.

Webflow’s Business Plan and Framer’s Pro Plan comparison

Hosting options. Webflow offers up to 400 GB bandwidth, along with up to 300,000 monthly visitors. Framer’s Pro plan is limited to 100 GB bandwidth and 200,000 visitors. Webflow also allows up to 20,000 user accounts and 2,500 monthly form submissions
CMS. Webflow offers up to 10,000 CMS items, whereas Framer limits this to 10 CMS collections. Besides that, Framer also has a 10 thousand limit for individual items for this plan, while Webflow’s Business plan also limits each collection to 60 items.
Publishing. Both options offer quick and easy publishing options to custom domains. There are no banners for any of the paid plans on Webflow and Framer.

Both offer great security and password protection options, along with various other hosting features, including 99.99% uptime SLAs.

Besides this comparison it’s important to highlight that Webflow’s main advantage is that you can add up to 10 content editors to edit dynamic content on your website, which is crucial for all large teams, while Framer doesn’t have capability for this at the moment.

One thing that Framer doesn’t support is ecommerce since there is no pricing plan for that, so I assume they don’t support ecommerce at the moment.

Available tools

The main difference in tools here is that Framer is a single tool to both design and manage your CMS, while Webflow is more robust, offering two different tools, Design mode and Edit mode. Designer is a main tool to build a website and its dynamic content, including animations, logic, code, and more.

Edit mode is more for content editing and management. On the top of that you can literally open Edit mode from your browser and directly type on text to edit it or click on image/video to swap it for a different one. It also let you access CMS to easily edit current dynamic content or create new pages from created template pages.

Now, Edit mode is especially useful for large teams since multiple people can do the same thing and publish huge amounts of content at the same time. It's a game changer for most organizations and an incredibly useful tool.

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Templates

Both tools have and use templates. Webflow has a small amount of free templates, but most of them need to be purchased, some worth more than $100+ per template and there are currently over 2,000+ available templates on the market.

Framer features free and paid templates as well that are highly customizable. It’s estimated that Framer has around 1,000+ available templates on the market.

SEO

Webflow is great for SEO as you can easily make a redirect, set global canonicals and even automatically generate sitemap or add robots.txt. If needed, you can manually add code for page canonicalization, schema markup, pagination, and more.

Most important SEO feature in Webflow is that Webflow writes clean code and allows you to minify JS and other code to optimize the site, add lazy load on images, and make a site that will perform great on tools like Google Lighthouse and other testing tools.

Framer has built-in GDPR-compliant analytics, which relies on GA4, which is a step forward compared to Webflow. Other than that, it offers pretty similar options like Webflow when it comes to SEO.

The truth is that neither of these builders can give you a 100% great SEO-optimized site if you don’t consider SEO principles while designing. Applying various SEO/content strategies after launching your site is important.

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Available resources

Webflow features popular Webflow University, which can help you master this tool for free, but it takes time and effort to do it.

Moreover, Webflow actively works on building a community around the globe, which is much larger compared to Framer. To get involved, you can visit one of the conferences, attend a webinar, or simply join the Community Forum. Webflow even features official exams where you can get certificates.

Besides all that, Webflow offers various blog topics and they recently launched Marketplace, where you can find various libraries, apps, experts, templates, and even showcase your work. That said, Webflow still needs to offer better customer support, since they don’t have 24/7 support and it’s very difficult to get in touch with them, unless you're an enterprise customer.

In Framer, most of the content and help you can find in the Community section is rapidly growing, offering various lessons, tutorials, a forum, and more. There is a separate Resources section to explore available experts, partners, and more.

Use of AI

Framer has a great AI tool! You just enter a prompt and they will do the rest for you, it’s that simple.

Honestly, they create a pretty decent job in terms of design, but I wouldn’t say it’s great since it’s still average work at best compared to good designers. You can further customize this to your liking, but it’s still not quite there to avoid any designers, developers, copywriters, and more.

Webflow has released some announcements regarding their AI and it sounds very promising, but we’ll still have to wait for the real-time use of it.

Conclusion

As we can see, there is no one solution that fits all, you’ll need to decide on which platforms work for you and your needs. You’ll have to dive deep and see what solutions works best for you.

If you’re a designer, Framer might be a great start and they might expand like Webflow did to cover more things and handle complex websites, but for now Webflow is just more powerful tool and all-in-one solutions for websites.

Since we’re a Webflow Agency and one of the experts in this field, we understand how powerful this tool is and we’ll have to side with Webflow on this. It is not perfect for everyone, that’s understandable, but do your research, see which tool is the best for you and then pick the right option for your project.

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