Webflow review: Pros and cons in 2024

The best website builders make it possible to create professional and attractive sites for your business. They offer design tools that enable you to put these pages together without any prior coding experience. Webflow is one of these builders that you may be considering.

Before deciding whether it is the right fit for your needs, it is important to learn more about Webflow’s design tools, the various plans that are available, relevant e-commerce functionalities and the key pros and cons of the platform.

Webflow overview

Webflow is a website builder designed to let individuals and companies create sites without the use of any coding. It allows users to customize the content and structure of each page to match their specific design visions. 

Once you’re happy with the layout and design of the site, you can publish it live on the web. Alternatively, you can export the site to add code — or have a developer add code for you — before pushing it live.

Webflow offers both general and e-commerce plans, including the free Starter plan. Paid general plans range from $18 to $49 per month, depending on the number of pages, CMS items, visitors and bandwidth you require. 

There are also custom Enterprise plan options available for larger organizations. E-commerce plans range from $42 to $235 per month. The upper-tier plans include more CMS items, allow you to sell more items and have no transaction fees.

Webflow pros and cons

Weighing the pros and cons of Webflow and how they relate to the specific needs of your business can help you determine whether this website builder offers the right fit.

Pros

For businesses with basic needs or those looking to test out the features to determine whether Webflow is the right fit for their needs, there is a forever free plan. The Starter plan, designed for entry-level sites, allows you to add up to two pages to your sites, provides up to 50 CMS items and enables up to 50 form submissions (over the lifetime of your site). 

Another benefit of Webflow is its site-building tools. You don’t need any prior design or coding experience to personalize the layout and design of a webpage. However, if you want to customize some of the elements further, you do have the option to add custom code. 

Max Veggeberg, the CEO of Tetra, has experience using Webflow for his company’s primary content management system. He shared, “It’s quite powerful and pretty flexible — you can write custom code in it, you can make components that make it easy to update things in a lot of places.”

If you’re looking to create an online store for your company, Webflow also offers e-commerce plans. Each plan allows you to design a custom store that will highlight your brand and feature the products you want to sell to your customers. The three available plans vary in the number of products you can sell, CMS items and transaction fees.

Cons

While there are several benefits to choosing Webflow, the downsides must not be overlooked. One of these drawbacks is that you’ll have to opt for a more expensive plan if you want to utilize multiple CMS items (such as blog posts, documents or items on a menu for a restaurant). 

The free Starter plan only includes 50 CMS items, while none are included with the Basic plan (which costs $18 per month). Once you upgrade to the CMS Plan (for $29 per month), you get 2,000 CMS items.

Those looking to set up an online store with one of the e-commerce plans should also be aware that they will have to pay transaction fees if they choose the cheapest plan. The Standard plan (which costs $29 per month) includes 2% transaction fees. In order to get rid of these fees, you’ll have to upgrade to the Plus plan, which costs an additional $45 per month.

Webflow only offers email support for all non-enterprise plan levels. This means that you won’t have access to live chat or phone support, which could result in delayed responses to questions you have. Similarly, while enterprise plan subscribers receive guided onboarding training to help them get started with the tools, all other subscribers must rely on Webflow University.

Webflow pricing and value

General plans

E-commerce plans

For the general site plans, Webflow has five tier options: Starter, Basic, CMS, Business and Enterprise. The Starter plan is free and the price of the other plans steps up incrementally, with the Business plan costing $49 per month (or $39 per month with annual billing). A custom-priced Enterprise plan is also available for larger organizations. 

While the free plan only allows you to create a website with up to two pages, 50 CMS items and 50 lifetime form submissions, and only provides 1 GB of bandwidth and a maximum of 1,000 visitors, these attributes continue to build as the tiers increase. 

With the Business plan, for example, your website can support up to 150 pages, 10,000 CMS items and 2,500 monthly form submissions. You’ll also receive 400 GB of bandwidth and can welcome up to 300,000 monthly visitors.

There are three e-commerce site plans that range from $42 to $235 per month (or $29 to $212 per month with annual billing). These plans vary in the number of allowed e-commerce and CMS items as well as transaction fees (the lower tier plan requires subscribers to pay 2% transaction fees, while no transaction fees are charged for the two upper tier plans).

Webflow also offers three workspace plans for in-house teams. These plans allow for varying numbers of users and commenters, offer different numbers of staging sites and offer different publishing permissions.

Freelancers and agencies can choose from three similar workspace plans. Like the in-house team plans, some of the key differences in these plans lie in the maximum number of users and commenters and the number of staging sites. Other differences revolve around roles and permissions and guest access.

Web editor

Webflow’s editor aims to make it possible to create professional pages, whether for a general website or an e-commerce one, without the need for any coding experience. Users have the flexibility to choose from pre-built elements, drag in unstyled HTML components or make modifications to different structure options. Customize the layout, font, colors and other page elements with ease.

As you’re designing, you can preview each page as it will appear on different devices and make changes as necessary to enhance readability and functionality for your customers and site visitors.

While it is possible to design a page without using any coding, Webflow also enables you to add custom code to personalize the look of each page further. While Veggeberg appreciates the overall flexibility that this provides, he noted, “The custom code feature has a max character limit.”

Veggeberg explained, “This is probably not an issue for a good developer, but their platform is meant to be used by non-developers, so it can be annoying at times for those of us who aren’t engineers.”

E-commerce functionality

There are three e-commerce plans available through Webflow for businesses that are looking to set up an online store. While these plans vary in the number of e-commerce and CMS items and transaction fees, they all enable users to customize the look of their online store, and promote and sell their products to customers. 

The customizable product fields allow you to choose which product features you want to share with your customers, whether you’re selling digital downloads or classes, physical products, or services.

With Webflow, you can also coordinate the design of the customer’s cart with that of the rest of your website for a more cohesive shopping experience. The transactional emails that are sent to customers with their receipt and purchase information are also fully customized, allowing you to stay consistent with the theme of your site and your overall brand.

Blogging

Webflow recommends the CMS plan for blogs. Choosing this plan enables you to create 150 pages on your site with 2,000 CMS items. You’ll also be able to welcome 250,000 visitors to your site, which should be sufficient for most bloggers.

One benefit of choosing Webflow if you’re looking to start a blog is the on-page editing feature. Being able to edit your site directly on the page makes it easier to see exactly what your readers will be viewing. You can also easily customize the content on your site and take advantage of SEO tools to help increase site traffic. 

Webflow offers several CMS templates for those who are looking for a more user-friendly and less design-focused experience. With these templates, you can create a website for your blog that matches its content and your specific vision.

Marketing and SEO

Webflow offers several marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) tools to help increase traffic. For example, you can use data from CMS Collections to more easily craft meta titles and meta descriptions to help your page rank. 

Users can also add schema markup to help search engines more easily understand their content. Some other key SEO features include alt tag editing, the ability to publish 301 redirects with ease and simple sitemap and indexing updates.

Performance and security

Webflow offers a range of security features to protect sensitive information. It is Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) compliant, meaning it passed a third-party audit testing security protocol.

All plans include SSL encryption to keep users with unauthorized access from viewing personal information (either about you or your customers). Webflow also relies on Amazon Web Services hosting to minimize the potential for cyber-attacks and other threats. Unlike other website builders, it doesn’t need third-party plugins, eliminating the potential risk of relying on other developers to stay up-to-date with security and updates.

Mobile app

Phoneflow is Weblow’s mobile app, which is available for download through both the Apple App Store and Google Play. With the app, users are able to post, edit, draft, archive and publish content. E-commerce users can also manage their online store, keep track of inventory and stay informed about new orders that are submitted. 

Webflow vs. top competitors

See how Webflow compares to two of its top competitors, WordPress and Shopify, before making a final decision about which website builder is best for your business.

Webflow vs WordPress

While Webflow and WordPress share some similarities, one of their key differences lies in the use of plugins. Many WordPress plans allow users to add plugins to their sites. These plugins can improve functionality and enable other features that would otherwise not be possible, such as the ability to set up an online store. 

Webflow, on the other hand, does not rely on plugins. Similar features are built directly into its site builders, eliminating the hassle of searching for and downloading plugins and the potential security risks that they may present.

However, Webflow does place some limits on its base plans, where there are none on similar WordPress plans. For example, the Free and Basic plans for Webflow only allow for 1 GB and 50 GB of bandwidth and two pages and 150 pages, respectively. All WordPress plans, even the free option, offer unlimited bandwidth and allow businesses or individuals to build an unlimited number of pages.

Webflow vs Shopify

If you’re looking to set up an online store, you might be comparing the Webflow e-commerce plans with those offered by Shopify. Webflow’s custom coding and design features may make it an appealing choice for those looking to create a website that matches their vision for their brand.

However, as far as e-commerce features go, you might decide that Shopify is a better choice. While Webflow places a limit on the number of e-commerce items you can sell through your site – 500, 5,000 and 15,000, respectively, for each of the three plans – all of Shopify’s plans enable you to sell an unlimited number of products. Shopify also offers 24/7 chat support for all plans, while Webflow only offers email support for all tiers below the Enterprise level.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Does Webflow have a free plan?

Yes, Webflow offers a free plan. Called the Starter plan, it allows individuals or businesses to create a very basic, entry-level website with a maximum of two pages, 50 CMS items and 50 form submissions (over the lifetime of the site). The free plan also only allows for limited traffic, with 1 GB bandwidth and a maximum of 1,000 unique monthly site visits.

Does Webflow have analytics?

Webflow users can integrate various analytics tools with their websites, including Google Analytics, Nocodelytics and Hotja.