Webflow Review — The Key Pros and Cons

In this webflow review, i take a look at a website building tool that places a huge emphasis on design flexibility. Is it right for building your online presence — or would you be better off with an alternative?

Let’s find out!

In this detailed look at Webflow, I’m going to give you:

• An overview of what webflow is, and how to use it
• A clear explanation of its pricing plans
• An assessment of webflow’s key design features
• A list of all the key pros and cons of webflow
• A list of the best alternative website builders to consider.

By the end of this review, you’ll have a much clearer idea of whether or not webflow is a good fit for building your website.

Let’s start with a key question…

What is Webflow?

Webflow is a website building platform that lets you create your own website or online store. It’s a cloud-based, ‘software as a service’ (saas) design tool that runs in a web browser, and you pay a monthly or yearly subscription to use it.

You can use Webflow in two ways:

1. By designing and hosting your website on Webflow (and using the Webflow editor to update it).
2. By designing a site with the platform, but then exporting the site’s code and hosting it on your own server space.

Most users opt for the first method: websites built with Webflow are more reliable when they are hosted on Webflow’s own servers, and easier to update (because you get access to a content management system and a style editor, neither of which are available in the self-hosted version).

Users who choose the second option — exporting Webflow websites to be hosted elsewhere — tend to be professional web developers and web design agencies that are comfortable with updating and editing websites via coding, rather than using content management systems to do so.

Webflow provides you with a large selection of customizable templates that can be edited to match your brand and services, and it contains many features that allow you to create a very original and visually impressive website.

Founded in 2013 and based in san francisco, webflow positions itself as a ‘no-code’ web development tool — a platform that allows non-programmers and programmers alike to create websites without needing development skills.

Despite its ‘no-code’ emphasis, you can edit the css of your webflow website, and add html or javascript to it.

Who is Webflow aimed at, and how many people use it?

The Webflow platform is aimed at a wide range of users, including:

• solopreneurs
• small business owners
• freelance web designers
• web design agencies
• large brands and tech companies

Now, when choosing a platform to build your business website with, it’s very important to know that it’s going to be there for the long haul — and this looks likely to be the case with webflow. The company has recently raised over $140 million in funding for continuing its growth and development, and is valued at $4 billion.

According to internet statistics company builtwith.Com, there are around 342,000 live websites built and hosted with webflow. Additionally, it counts zendesk, dell, and upwork among its clients.

So, overall, webflow looks like a safe bet as a website building tool.

But how much does it cost to use?

Webflow pricing

Webflow pricing is confusing.

This is because with webflow, you have to deal with three sets of plans: ‘site plans,’ ‘ecommerce plans‘ and ‘workspace plans’.

Ecommerce and Site plans

The ‘site’ and ‘ecommerce’ plans are the easiest to understand, because they work in a similar way to those offered by well-known online website builders like wix and shopify.

In other words, with these plans you pay a monthly fee and get all the key things you need to build a website or store with — hosting, a content management system (cms) and the option to map your site to a custom domain.

In the case of the ‘ecommerce’ plans you also get tools for selling products online.

The ‘site’ and ‘ecommerce’ plans are priced as follows:

In terms of the differences between ‘site plans,’ these revolve around:

• Whether or not you want access to a content management system (the ‘basic’ plan doesn’t give you access to one — you can only create ‘static’ sites with it)
• How many editable ‘cms items’ (dynamic content items like blog posts and galleries) you need on your site
• The number of visitors that can visit your site per month
• Storage space
• The number of people who can edit your site.

As for the ‘Ecommerce’ plans, the main differences between these involve:

• the number of products you can sell — 500 on ‘Standard’, 1,000 on ‘Plus’ and 3,000 on ‘Advanced’
• transaction fees — 2% on the ‘Standard’ plan, 0% on the others
• sales limits – on the ‘Standard’ and ‘Plus’ plans, a $50k and $200k limit applies to sales revenue (there is no limit on the ‘Advanced’ plan).

Workspace plans

While the ‘site’ and ‘ecommerce’ plans can be used by individuals who simply want to build a website themselves, ‘workspace’ plans are more geared towards professional web designers and web design agencies.

They let you manage multiple sites, and build them in collaboration with multiple users.

Significantly, the ‘workspace’ plans also let you export your site code. This means that if you like, you can simply upload this code to your own server, or hand it over to a developer to enhance.

(if you do this however, you won’t be able to use the webflow content management system to edit your site when it’s live — you are able to export a static design only).

There are 6 ‘workspace’ plans available:

• Starter – $0 per month
• Freelancer – $24 per month
• Core – $28 per month
• Agency – $42 per month
• Growth – $60 per month
• Enterprise – custom pricing.

The ‘freelancer’ and ‘agency’ plans are designed for web design agencies building webflow sites for clients, while the ‘starter,’ ‘core,’ growth’ and ‘enterprise’ plans are intended for individuals and companies building their own sites.

The differences between all these workspace pricing plans involve:

• the number of users who can work on a project simultaneously (1 on ‘Starter,’ 3 on ‘Freelancer’ and ‘Core,’ 9 on ‘Agency’ and ‘Growth’ and a negotiable number on ‘Enterprise.’
• the number of sites that can be managed (2 on ‘Starter,’ 10 on ‘Freelancer’ ‘Core,’and an unlimited number on ‘Agency,’ ‘growth’ and ‘Enterprise.’)
• publishing permissions (you can define them on the ‘Agency’, ‘Growth’ or ‘Enterprise’ plans)
• whether custom code can be added (this is possible on all plans except the ‘Starter’ one)
• whether your site code can be exported (again, this is possible on all the plans except ‘Starter’)
• security and enhanced customer support – if you are on an ‘Enterprise’ plan, you get advanced features for managing security plus access to a ‘customer success support manager’ (this gives you more of a ‘white glove’ customer support setup than the other plans, which provide email support only).

Now, what you need to note about all these ‘Workspace’ plans is that none of them come with hosting, let you use Webflow’s CMS or map a site to a domain (yoursitename.com etc.).

To do all that, you have to purchase one of the ‘Site’ or ‘Ecommerce’ plans in addition to your Workspace plan.

If all this sounds complicated, you’re right: it is. Perhaps existing Webflow users will disagree, but my view is that the pricing structure could do with a lot of consolidation and simplification — it’s probably the most offputting aspect of the product.

But if you can get past the convoluted pricing structure, you’ll find that there’s a lot of really nice features in Webflow.

Let’s dig into these, starting with visuals.