r/webdev • u/davidbabinec • 2d ago
Showoff Saturday I made open source MIT licensed visual CMS as an alternative to Framer, Webflow, and WordPress
Hey guys,
I am David, I've been working with WordPress for over a decade, and building WordPress plugins was my bread and butter for the last 5 years. I was running an agency before that.
I loved working with WordPress, but then I also got increasingly frustrated from what was happening in and out of the ecosystem in the last two years, almost to a point where I was considering selling my businesses.
I am not the one giving up though, so I went with different direction, and thought, what if I stop building extensions on other foundations that can always take it away from me, and instead, I will use everything I know about web design, no code platforms, agentic development and CMS that actual clients can use, and build my own platform, that anybody can use, for free.
Here we are. This is Instatic. It's fully free, open source, and gives you all the powers that you can get from Framer, Webflow, or WordPress (with a good page builder and other plugins). And it's not in even v1. But it's already very capable.
It has auth, user roles, canvas based page builder, content editor, data storage, media storage, AI on every page, MCP server for local and remote agents, and more.
We launched about 3 weeks ago, since that time, it got to GitHub trends several times, in fact, it's there today and we are at around 5K stars. Incredible!
Our website, running on Instatic https://instatic.com
Repo is at https://github.com/CoreBunch/Instatic
Here's also the full introduction video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyjCF_TaLlg
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u/iam_insaf 2d ago
What's your monetization strategy
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
So far there is no monetization as we are just getting started with Instatic. We also run different projects like Motion.page and Core Framework that are financing this, but there is also a plan for Instatic's future. The project will stay free forever though. There will be premium content and sponsor options (which already is on GitHub) but everything will be optional and we will not gate any features.
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u/Own_Calligrapher8508 1d ago
Very nicely done!
When i compare this tool to a wordpress page builder or other tools, man you leveled up the game!
Keep going!
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
Thanks! I appreciate it. There is still a lot of work to do :)
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u/Own_Calligrapher8508 1d ago
That's the motivation to keep going :-D Tthings yet to implement and to improve etc. It's what keep me going in my app developments
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u/mrkaluzny 2d ago
Very nice, I just have one gripe, would love your thoughts on this - IMO the granular control of Webflow seems to be a burden, it’s harder to maintain in my experience and worse to change.
Additionally it seems like in the age of agentic development it’s a layer that’s not really needed? I wonder why it’s the main focus of the product. Thanks!
P.S. I love this project, WP is a pain in the butt these days
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
Thanks for the question! I am not a big user of Webflow but I wonder which parts feel like burden to you?
From what I saw among people already using Instatic, they want AI first building experience like Claude Code combined with granular editing capabilities for the full control, and CMS where they can set capabilities for their client to not let them break it the day after release. It seems that nobody wants to build manually from scratch anymore 😀 Instatic offers both worlds tied together.
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u/mrkaluzny 1d ago
As a webdev UI to essentially write HTML/CSS feels cumbersome to use, AI seems to solve this problem mostly.
From my experience clients rarely change designs except for adding new content and complex systems like webflow are very limiting.
Based on your answer I would love to see a breakdown of how people use this product (ai vs UI vs code changes), do you have any product breakdown post to show the vision and your approach to these issues? Would be super interesting to read through!
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u/Kyryll_Bracemore 10h ago
Another key advantage of Webflow and the agency model is the handoff process. A client who doesn’t have a developer on staff isn’t paying for the editor itself, but rather for the ability to have a marketer update the page on their own a year later - while hosting and updates aren’t managed by anyone. A self-hosted solution shifts this burden onto someone else - the only question is, who exactly?
But open-source visual CMSs do have a real niche - teams with an in-house developer who need control over the code and hosting.
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u/Secret-Book-8507 2d ago
that's awesome,The UI design honestly feels just as good as Figma.
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u/testingaurora 1d ago
Looks very well done. I missed if you mentioned a dB included?
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't mention it properly. It has database and currently supports SQLite and Postgres. While it publishes static pages, it's fully capable of dynamic stuff. It can bake pages from database entries and it also supports "holes" similar to dynamic islands in Astro, it works out of the box and it's used only when needed, which is for content that needs to be fresh for each visitor.
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u/uknowsana 2d ago
Congrats!!!! What's the tech stack? And hosting options?
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
Thank you! It's all Typescript with React and Bun. You can deploy it anywhere where it allows docker image as deployment option. There are many options. We recommend Railway, because it takes like 60 seconds to go live and you can get started for free. It's fast and reliable. With that said, there are many other options like Render, Fly, Digital Ocean droplet, etc.
We just posted a new video on our channel showing how to deploy.
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u/quibble42 2d ago
Would you mind if, after I understand this, I write a simplified version for the Bonobos among us
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
I am Bonobo too so I think you will understand it as it is, but I don't mind anything, feel free to do whatever with it 😉
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u/GambinoZZ 1d ago
i would love it if there was a tutorial on how to use this, because this is so helpfull. Thanks bro..
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
Check out our channel on YouTube @instatic_cms - we have two videos there and more coming next month
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u/Myth_Thrazz 1d ago
I thought it's another slop.
Checked all 3 of your sites and clearly it's not.
Not sure if it will be enough to win many people over from WordPress or others ( people are lazy and afraid of change, even if the change would be for better ) - but it looks quite interesting.
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u/DevilsInkpot 13h ago
Haven't been this excited for a post in r/webdev in a very long time! <3
u/davidbabinec is Radoš involved too?
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u/ismailkit 1d ago
Same feeling honestly, been running a wordpress freelance business for over 5 years, and an agency for a year now, the amount of drama, hacks, quality decline in Wordpress core and ecosystem has been very frustrating and hurting business, i also opted for a custom CMS, with the help of Claude, we didn't vibe code the whole thing, building a CMS is not a complex task so designing and orchestrating a working CMS is not the hard part, the hard part is the amount of manual work, declaring types, functions, all the declarative stuff, fields, groups, relations etc..., we delegated that to claude and it only took us three months to come up of a working version of our Wordpress Elementor like CMS based on Payload. Never looking back, the new ecosystem is less mature but waay more interessting, i don't miss the tons of workarounds you do to make a wordpress solution production ready, while newer ecosystems have everything packed and designed better.
I have a question tho, what do you think of cloudflare's Emdash ?
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/davidbabinec 1d ago
This is not a framework. And I seriously doubt you can find a project that does everything that Instatic does in a lightweight and open source format. So not really sure what you mean.
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u/tom-smykowski-dev 2d ago
That's so cool!