Webflow has been the default answer for design-led marketing builds in our shop for four years. In the second half of 2022, that started to shift. Framer’s relaunch as a full website builder — not just a prototyping tool — has moved fast enough that we are now genuinely choosing between the two for every new marketing-site project that lands in our pipeline.
This is not a ‘Webflow is dead’ post. Webflow is excellent. But the conversation has changed in nine months in ways worth writing down.
What changed
Framer was a prototyping tool through 2019, with a Code-meets-Design pitch aimed at product designers. The 2020 pivot to Sites added basic web publishing. The 2022 rebuild — they relaunched as ‘Framer’ the website builder this past summer — added a real CMS, dynamic content, breakpoints worth using, and a code-component API that lets developers extend the canvas.
The key shift in 2022 was the interaction and animation system. Framer’s animations are tied to the same underlying primitives that Framer Motion exposes in React — variants, transitions, gestures, spring physics. The result, on a marketing page, is animations that feel like a product designer built them, not a CMS template animation that the brand has to live with.
Webflow’s animation system, Interactions, is genuinely powerful but harder to use. The interface is more like an animation timeline editor than a stateful component model. For the kind of work that marketing teams actually ship — scroll-triggered hero reveals, button hover micro-interactions, page transitions — Framer is now meaningfully faster to build in.
The CMS comparison
Both platforms have a CMS layer. Webflow CMS has been mature for years. Framer CMS is new — it shipped last fall — and is younger.
Webflow’s CMS wins on schema flexibility, reference fields, paginated archives, and import/export tooling. If the project is a real content site — a blog with hundreds of posts, a case study library, a team page that needs to scale — Webflow CMS handles it better today.
Framer’s CMS is enough for a marketing site with a small blog, a careers page, and a couple of dynamic listings. It is not enough for a publication or a content-marketing engine that ships ten posts a week. We have hit Framer CMS limits on two of our six client projects, both of which had unusually heavy content needs.
Performance
Both platforms publish fast sites. The output is real HTML, real CSS, sensible image handling, edge-hosted. Lighthouse mobile scores on a tuned build land in the 90s on both.
Framer’s JavaScript payload is heavier per page than Webflow’s, because the animation system ships some runtime. On a build that uses minimal animations, the difference is small. On a build with rich scroll-triggered animations, Framer’s payload can be 60 to 100 kilobytes more than the Webflow equivalent. For most marketing sites this is not a deal-breaker, but it is the place we are most likely to push back on Framer’s defaults.
The collaboration model
This is where Framer is doing something Webflow has not solved. The Framer canvas is multiplayer in the same way Figma is multiplayer. Multiple designers can edit the same page simultaneously, see each other’s cursors, comment on specific elements.
For a brand team that already lives in Figma, the transition to Framer is short. The mental model is the same. The keyboard shortcuts are the same. The component system maps directly across.
Webflow’s collaboration model is more traditional — one editor at a time per project, branching available on higher plans, comments through Project Comments. It works fine for the way most agencies operate but it is not the multiplayer experience Framer offers.
Cost
Framer’s pricing is per site. The Pro tier — needed for CMS and code components — is 20 dollars a month per site. Webflow’s CMS tier is 23 dollars a month per site.
For an agency that ships many client sites, both platforms have agency programs with discounted tiers. The unit cost difference is not the deciding factor.
The build cost differs more. A Framer build, in our experience, ships about 20 to 30 percent faster than the equivalent Webflow build, for design-led marketing pages. The faster build is mostly because the animation system is closer to the way designers think — less translating between Figma intent and CSS execution.
Where Webflow still wins
For three project shapes, we still default to Webflow.
First, content-heavy sites with serious CMS needs. Webflow CMS handles a blog with hundreds of posts, paginated case study archives, faceted filtering, and complex reference graphs. Framer does not, yet.
Second, sites that need to export to a static host or move off-platform later. Webflow has clean HTML export. Framer is more locked-in to the Framer hosting.
Third, sites that need an established ecosystem of third-party integrations. Webflow has been around long enough that the integration story — Memberstack, Zapier, Make, dozens of CMS sync tools — is mature. Framer’s third-party ecosystem is younger.
Where Framer is winning
For design-led marketing sites — agency sites, startup landing pages, product launch microsites, brand sites where the design quality is the brief — Framer is now our first recommendation.
The handoff from Figma is genuinely faster. The animation system is genuinely better for the kinds of motion clients want. The collaboration model is the model brand teams already live in. For the right project, Framer takes weeks off the build timeline, and the result feels more like a product than a website.
The next 12 months
The thing we are watching is whether Framer closes the CMS gap. If Framer CMS reaches feature parity with Webflow CMS in 2023 — particularly on schema, references, and content scale — the default tips further. If it does not, the platforms settle into a clean division: Webflow for content sites, Framer for marketing and brand sites.
Either way, the era of Webflow as the only answer in the design-led no-code conversation is over. There is a real choice now, and the choice has consequences for project shape, team workflow, and what ‘a website’ even looks like in 2023.