Webflow Review 2025: After 12 Website Builders, Here Is What I Know

I have tried every website builder. I am not being dramatic. Over the last eleven years as a freelance web designer and now running a small agency, I have built real client projects on Dreamweaver (yes, I am old enough), WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Shopify, Carrd, Editor X, Framer, Duda, Cargo, and Webflow. Some were one-off experiments. Several were my primary tool for years before I moved on. A few I actively regret wasting time on.

I am tired. Not of building websites -- I still enjoy the craft. I am tired of every new tool promising to be the last one I will ever need. I am tired of migrating client sites because a platform changed its pricing or killed a feature or got acquired and neglected. I am tired of learning a new visual editor every eighteen months. And I am especially tired of reviews that breathlessly describe every feature without mentioning the parts that will make you want to throw your laptop out a window.

So here is an honest, experienced, slightly cranky review of Webflow in 2025. I have been using it as my primary tool for about four years now. I know it well enough to love it and hate it on the same day, sometimes in the same hour.

What Webflow Actually Does Well

Let me start with what keeps me here despite the complaints I am about to unload, because there are legitimate reasons Webflow has survived my impossible standards.

The visual design tool outputs real, clean HTML and CSS. This is the whole selling point and it is real. When you set a flexbox layout in Webflow, you are literally setting CSS flexbox properties through a visual interface. When you add a class, it generates a CSS class. When you create an animation, it writes CSS animations and JavaScript transforms. The code it produces is not perfect, but it is readable, standards-compliant, and a universe apart from the div-soup garbage that Wix generates.

This means two things that matter. First, websites built in Webflow actually perform well because the underlying code is not fighting the browser. I have consistently achieved Lighthouse scores above 90 on Webflow sites with proper image optimization, which is more than I can say for most WordPress sites running three page builder plugins.

Second, it means that if I ever need to leave Webflow (and I have learned to always plan for leaving), I can export the code and continue working with it. The export is not a smooth handoff -- you lose the CMS, you lose hosting, and you lose the visual editor -- but the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are yours. With Wix or Squarespace, you get nothing. Your site exists only inside their ecosystem, and leaving means starting over from scratch. I have had to explain this to exactly two clients who wanted to move away from Squarespace, and the conversation was not fun either time.

The CMS: Good Enough, Barely

Webflow's CMS is powerful enough for marketing sites, portfolios, and blogs. Collection items with custom fields, reference fields linking collections together, dynamic page templates -- it handles the content modeling for maybe 80% of the sites I build. I have set up blog systems, team directories, case study libraries, FAQ sections, and product catalogs using it.

Where it falls apart is at scale or with complexity. You are limited to 10,000 CMS items on the Business plan. That sounds like a lot until you have a client with a product catalog of 3,000 items who also wants blog posts, testimonials, FAQs, and location pages in the CMS. Suddenly 10,000 is tight. On the Enterprise plan the limit goes up to 100,000, but you need to talk to sales and the price jumps accordingly.

The editing experience for non-technical clients is... not great. I have spent countless hours building Loom videos walking clients through the Webflow Editor because it is not as intuitive as they expect. They are used to WordPress or Squarespace editors where you click on text and type. Webflow's Editor is better than it used to be, but it still confuses people who are not designers or developers. I had one client describe it as "feeling like I am going to break something" every time she logged in. That is not the feeling you want from a content editor.

There is no content scheduling on lower plans. No revision history for CMS items (there is for pages, but not content). No way to set up approval workflows. For a platform that markets itself to agencies and teams, these are notable gaps that WordPress solved a decade ago.

The Designer: Incredible Power, Steep Price of Entry

The Webflow Designer is where I spend most of my time, and it is genuinely the most powerful visual web design tool ever made. I do not say that lightly. I have used a lot of these tools. The Designer gives you real CSS control -- every property, every pseudo-class, every breakpoint, every state. You can build things in Webflow that are impossible in Squarespace, difficult in WordPress without custom code, and impractical in Framer without JavaScript.

The interactions and animations system is spectacular. I can build scroll-triggered animations, page transitions, hover effects, and complex multi-step animations visually. No code, no plugins, and the output is performant because it uses CSS transforms and opacity rather than animating layout properties. I built a parallax landing page for a client last month that would have required a developer and a JavaScript library in any other tool. In Webflow, it took me half a day.

But -- and this is a big but that I rarely see mentioned in reviews -- the learning curve is severe. I have been doing this for over a decade, and it still took me about three months before I felt comfortable in the Designer. The interface has hundreds of options spread across panels, and unless you already understand the CSS box model, flexbox, grid, positioning, and responsive design, you are going to struggle. Webflow teaches you CSS through its interface, which is educational and also extremely frustrating when you just want to move a box 20 pixels to the right and nothing is doing what you think it should.

I have trained four junior designers on Webflow over the years. Average time to proficiency: about two months of daily use. Average time to being trusted with client projects: four to five months. Compare that to Squarespace, where I can get someone building client-ready sites in two weeks. The power comes at a cost, and that cost is time.

Hosting and Performance

Webflow hosts sites on AWS and Fastly CDN. The performance is good -- not exceptional, but consistently good. Sites load fast, uptime is reliable (I have not had a client report downtime in two years), and the SSL certificates are automatic. The hosting is bundled with the platform, so there is no server to manage, no security updates to install, no caching plugins to configure. It just works, which after years of managing WordPress hosting and dealing with slow shared servers and hacked sites and database crashes, I appreciate more than I can express.

Page load times for a typical marketing site: 1.5 to 2.5 seconds on mobile, depending on image optimization and third-party scripts. This is solid but not bleeding-edge. Statically generated sites on Vercel or Netlify will be faster. But for the type of client who uses Webflow -- someone who needs a professional website and is not optimizing for every millisecond -- it is more than good enough.

The Pricing Situation

I am going to be blunt: Webflow's pricing is confusing and has gotten worse over time. There are now two separate pricing structures -- one for "Site plans" (per project) and one for "Workspace plans" (per team). You need both. A client's site needs a Site plan for hosting, and your agency needs a Workspace plan for building sites. You can spend a solid twenty minutes on the pricing page and still be unsure what you are paying for.

Here is the breakdown as I understand it in early 2025, and I reserve the right to be wrong because they seem to change this every few months:

Site plans for published websites range from free (webflow.io subdomain, Webflow branding, 1 page) to the General plans which start at 14 dollars per month for a basic site going up to 39 dollars per month for a CMS-enabled site and 79 dollars per month for the Business plan with 10,000 CMS items and more bandwidth. E-commerce adds another layer starting at 29 dollars per month on top of the site plan.

Workspace plans for teams start at free (limited to 2 unhosted projects), then Core at 28 dollars per month per seat, and Growth at 60 dollars per month per seat.

For a solo freelancer with five client sites, the math works out to something like: one Core workspace seat (28/month) plus five CMS site plans (5 x 39 = 195/month) totaling 223 dollars per month. That is not nothing. For a small agency with three designers and fifteen client sites, you are looking at over 600 dollars per month before any e-commerce sites.

Compare that to WordPress: free software, 10 dollars per month for decent hosting per site, and a one-time theme purchase. For fifteen sites that is about 150 dollars per month. Webflow's premium is the trade-off for not dealing with WordPress maintenance, security, and plugin management. Whether that trade-off is worth 4x the cost depends on how much you value your sanity.

What I Have Learned Over the Years

After building somewhere around 200 websites across every platform imaginable, here is what I have figured out about Webflow specifically and website builders generally.

No tool is forever. I used WordPress exclusively for five years. Then Squarespace for two. Then Webflow for four and counting. Each was the right tool at the time, and each had a shelf life. Webflow might be my last tool, or I might be writing about Framer 2.0 in three years. The important thing is to stay portable -- own your designs, export what you can, document your processes, and do not fall so in love with any platform that you cannot leave it.

Webflow is best for designer-built marketing sites. Portfolios, agency sites, startup landing pages, product marketing, event sites, small business websites -- this is where Webflow shines brightest and where the pricing makes the most sense. The sites that need to look custom and polished but do not need complex backend logic.

Webflow is not good for complex web applications. I tried building a membership site with user dashboards once. Never again. If your project needs user authentication, complex forms with conditional logic, database-heavy features, or anything that feels more "app" than "website," use something else. WordPress with the right plugins, or better yet, a custom build with Next.js or similar.

Client handoff is Webflow's weakest point. Every platform I have used, from Squarespace to WordPress to Wix, has an easier content editing experience for non-technical clients. Webflow's Editor has improved, but it still requires training. Budget extra hours for client onboarding and expect ongoing support questions. This is not a dealbreaker, but it is a hidden cost that does not show up on the pricing page.

Webflow vs. What I Have Used Before

Webflow vs. WordPress: WordPress gives you more flexibility, a larger ecosystem, and lower costs. Webflow gives you cleaner output, better visual design tools, and no maintenance burden. I moved from WordPress to Webflow because I was spending more time updating plugins and fixing hacked sites than actually designing. I do not regret the switch, but I miss the WordPress plugin ecosystem when I need something Webflow does not have, which is often.

Webflow vs. Squarespace: Squarespace is for people who want a nice website without thinking about it. Webflow is for people who want to control every pixel. If your client would be happy with a Squarespace template, use Squarespace -- it is cheaper, easier to hand off, and you will finish the project faster. If the client wants something custom that reflects their specific brand and vision, Webflow is the right tool. I still use Squarespace for about 20% of my projects, usually the smaller ones.

Webflow vs. Framer: Framer has gotten impressive fast. The visual editor is arguably more intuitive than Webflow's, and the built-in animations are delightful. But Framer's CMS is newer and less mature, the template ecosystem is smaller, and the code output is React-based which makes exporting and customizing harder. I see Framer as a real threat to Webflow, especially for landing pages and marketing sites. Ask me again in a year.

My Honest Recommendation, After Everything