Webflow Review 2023: Is It Right for You?

Webflow is a SaaS company focusing on building and hosting websites. It’s commonly marketed as a visual development toolbox, offering features that can assist you end-to-end with a site-building and publishing process.

Webflow features a browser-based visual editing software that automatically generates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It can be used by designers, developers, and even entire marketing teams due to its convenient CMS that doesn’t require understanding the entire backend.

Hosting is an integral part of Webflow as well, and the platform uses both Fastly and Amazon Cloudfront.

Overall, Webflow is a great tool for building and hosting sites, but the right question is this — Is Webflow right for you? 

In the following review, we’ll cover who Webflow is intended for, whether it fits your budget, and what features to pay attention to. Moreover, we’ll review the significant pros and cons of using Webflow to help you decide if it’s the right fit. 

Who Is Webflow For?

Before answering this question, you have to ask yourself this: do you want to use Webflow to build a website or have your website built on Webflow by someone else?

In other words, Webflow has two target customers: web designers/developers and customers who want a Webflow-powered website.

If you belong to the first category, you belong to one of the following groups:

• A freelance web designer or developer — If you want to offer web design and development services and use a great visual builder, Webflow is the right choice. 
• A web design agency — If you’re an agency specializing in web design and development, Webflow is a great option. Flow Ninja is one such example. Our Webflow agency has extensive experience in designing, building, and maintaining sites with this tool. 

Customers who want a Webflow site probably belong to one of the following categories:

• Startups
• Small, medium, and large businesses
• Enterprise companies

You’re probably wondering: why not both? Well, virtually anyone can try to both design and host their site via Webflow, but in many cases, it comes down to the following two categories:

• Solopreneurs — They often go for the low-budget plan and use Webflow to make quick one-pagers to showcase their business.
• Large brands and tech companies — They often have in-house teams that can design and develop a site in Webflow. Still, we recommend contacting Webflow experts to get the most from the popular builder.  

How Much Does Webflow Cost?

Pricing is somewhat complex for Webflow, and we recommend reading our detailed Webflow pricing guide to understand how it works.

In short, you should pick a pricing plan based on what you want to do with Webflow. If you have already hired a freelancer or an agency to build your Webflow website, you just need to pick one of the pricing plans. 

These plans start at $14 a month if billed annually. However, the most popular plan, dubbed CMS, starts at $23 a month, and it provides overall the best price/value ratio unless you opt for the Enterprise option, which doesn’t feature a pricing option. Instead, you need to contact Webflow’s sales team to get a quote. If your website is an online store, you should pick an e-commerce hosting plan starting at $29 monthly.

If you want to build your website or have a team within a company that will actively rely on one (or more) of Webflow’s tools, you need to pick one of the workspace plans. There are two separate sets of pricing plans for in-house teams and for freelancers and agencies.

The basic plans are free of charge in both cases, but they also come with many limits. Plans for in-house teams start at $19 per month per seat, while freelancer & agency plans start at $16 per month per seat.

Best Webflow Features for 2023

With Webflow, users get all the features they need to build websites in accordance with industry trends.

However, the popular builder is continuously updating their features list, so here are some that were introduced recently and are likely to be dominant in 2023.

• Memberships — With Memberships, you can provide gated content on your website to your logged-in users.
• Creator profiles — Creators will now have a better and more detailed design of their public Webflow profiles.
• Webflow components — Components is the new name for Webflow symbols, except that they come with several essential improvements to showcase the power of the popular builder.
• Page branching — With page branching, multiple designers can work simultaneously on separate pages. This option is only available to Enterprise customers.
• Guest on workspaces — Webflow has added a guest role that enables freelancers and agencies to join client workspaces in full design mode. This feature is free.

This list doesn’t end here, as Webflow makes updates regularly, constantly improving the overall service for all types of users.

Webflow Pros

Here are some of the main advantages of using Webflow.

• Drag and drop page builder functionality — Visual design has never been easier for websites.
• Intuitive editor — The Editor allows changing static and dynamic content on the site without dealing with complex backend logic.
• Work directly with CMS data — Content structures can be created manually (or via CSV or API) and visually formatted.
• Creating eCommerce sites — Establishing an online store is streamlined with Webflow.
• Responsive page designs — Webflow is created with responsiveness in mind, meaning you can quickly adjust your websites and optimize them for mobile devices. 
• Reusable CSS classes —  Preserve styling information across multiple elements by using classes.
• Great Flexbox capabilities — Flexbox lets designers align and stack elements within elements precisely, allowing them to achieve more precise layouts.
• Global color swatches — You can edit “global” color swatches in one place and have them updated across your entire website.

Webflow Cons

There are still a couple of aspects that Webflow can improve in.

• Webflow does not have a mobile app that can assist you with editing your site on the move.
• There are few ready-made image galleries available compared to other similar services.
• There are limits to the number of pages in Webflow. You can build up to 100 pages, but the number of CMS items can be unlimited for Enterprise customers. 
• Yoast doesn't integrate with Webflow to help you with SEO, but the good news is that Webflow has built-in powerful SEO tools.

Is Webflow the Right Solution for You?

Everyone can use Webflow, but the real question is what you need it for. If you want to have a site hosted on it, including using the powerful CMS and other related features, you need to find suitable freelancers or agencies to build the site for you. That’s where Flow Ninja comes in.

However, suppose you’re a freelancer, a web design agency, or a company with an in-house web design team. In that case, you should focus on exploring the workspace solutions, as they include access to Webflow Designer and many other features essential for building sites via the platform.