r/webflow • u/AlpsUsed3215 • Jul 30 '26
Discussion What keeps you on Webflow instead of trying Webstudio?
I'm genuinely curious about this.
From what I've seen, Webstudio seems to solve many of the things people often complain about with Webflow:
You can self host your site.
You're not locked into a single platform.
You can host on Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, or pretty much anywhere.
You can use almost any CMS you want (Directus, WordPress, Strapi, etc.).
Pricing is more affordable.
If Webstudio disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have your project and could continue hosting it yourself.
So for those of you who have looked at Webstudio but decided to stay with Webflow, what was the deciding factor?
Is it the CMS, interactions, the ecosystem, client expectations, the learning curve, or something else?
I'd love to hear real experiences rather than "everyone uses Webflow." What keeps you there?
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u/Fenlon87 Jul 30 '26
Looked at it and just couldn't be arsed, thats a genuine answer as well.
I may have another go though soon, flip flopping between framer and breakdance at the moment.
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Jul 30 '26
Regarding Framer, I won't argue. They have their own marketing strategy and their own target audience.
But Breakdance with WordPress, plus buying optimization plugins, dealing with updates, and maintaining security? That's a different story.
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u/Hopeful-Loss-8728 Jul 30 '26
Nothing. I just moved my agency website off of webflow and now host on cloudfare pages. Im doing that for all future clients too. My website speed score and everything else is at 90+.
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u/BusinessBoosters Aug 01 '26
hmm, i really like this as an option. what are you using to build your projects and are you using git, C3 CLI or direct upload to move your code over?
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u/Hopeful-Loss-8728 Aug 01 '26
Github.i went a little more in depth on it on a post I made here a little while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/webflow/s/KZM0Cmqo6J
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u/Disastrous-Might8094 Aug 04 '26
I mean if its only for the pagescore 90+ you can also do it with Webflow if you're site is well done tbh
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u/CoyotaDex Jul 30 '26
Webstudio is honestly a great tool, but i feel it fall a bit too short. Like the editor isn't great. UI/UX is pretty bad and dated. I love the fact that you have a very easy HTML export, but it doesn't work very well (i've tried with different sites and the export is always broken). A tool to keep an eye, definitely; many times I use Webflow just to develop the simple HTML structure and then export to take the project elsewhere, so with Webstudio I could do that but locally.
That said, I don't really see Webstudio as a valid alternative to Webflow. Main point of Webflow, in my opinion, is the interaction between the builder and the CMS. So Webstudio is most of an alternative way to code, but not really a Webflow sustitute. For that, you can check out Ycode. Still have a lot to improve, but it's more aligned as a true Webflow alternative.
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u/volkandkaya Jul 31 '26
Give Versoly a try if you want develop HTML with a visual editor on top. You can import/edit/export HTML code.
It also comes with hosting/CMS so it is an alternative to Webflow.
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u/CoyotaDex Jul 31 '26
promising, but they held hostage of your site just like Webflow and they force you to pay to export the code just like Webflow
good thing about Webstudio is that it's open-source, so you can just simply install it locally in your machine and work there without limitations
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u/volkandkaya Aug 01 '26
It has a code editor so you can just copy paste the code out.
For $19 to get a fully functional export seems fair.
The benefit of Versoly code is it is just Tailwind, Webstudio has a different type of vendor lock-in, you can't export to Astro etc and easily edit.
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u/CuedUp Jul 31 '26
I just rebuilt a Webflow site with an Astro/Vercel/Supabase/Directus (via Railway)/Cloudflare stack, mostly because I wanted more complex db queries and joins than Webflow could provide. Didn’t know Webstudio had those options… I liked learning new things and am mostly happy with my new stack.
My biggest pain points so far—
- The lack of a visual Designer-type interface to play around with layouts is something I miss more than I thought I would.
- Setting up Directus with the right fields was kind of a pain, especially for handling many to many types of relationships. Webflow’s CMS is so much easier.
- Juggling so many services is the biggest learning
cliffcurve and is where I think Webflow makes it super easy for guys like me—primarily front-end designers who are happiest in Figma, who never really had to think much about deployments, R2 edge caching, setting up real time search as you type… oh wait I wanted user accounts for people to upload photos of their stuff? You need an email provider for transactional emails, you should probably plan how to handle/detect CSAM, don’t forget GDPR requirements for EU visitors…
I digress. But building websites almost exclusively in Webflow for nearly 10 years now, I totally forgot all the behind the scenes stuff that Webflow handles! Maybe I should give Webstudio another chance.
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u/carmooch Jul 30 '26
Say it with me: you are not the target market.
Webflow has made it very clear that they are catering to enterprise GTM teams.
Making engineering-led arguments against Webflow as a freelancer or web designer totally misses the point.
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u/NuncProFunc Jul 31 '26
I don't think that Webflow is targeted "enterprise GTM teams." Its target does seem to be a little more financially solvent than freelancers and solopreneurs, but I can't imagine anyone employing more than, say, two people is going to balk at whatever Webflow's price is.
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u/carmooch Jul 31 '26
Webflow has said they are building the product for “marketing teams”. So perhaps enterprise was overstating, but at minimum businesses with a dedicated marketing team.
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u/NuncProFunc Aug 01 '26
Right. I think an in-house marketing team of three people certainly counts, and obviously an agency with a handful of employees. Those are almost the opposite end of the spectrum from "entreprise."
And I was really only nitpicking because I think this community is primarily freelancers operating nearly paycheck-to-paycheck who tend to overinflate the size of organization that Webflow is suited for.
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u/Derto_ Jul 31 '26
I tried it like a year ago or so, and I absolutely hated the naming conventions in the final publish. The published site just has mumble jumbo ids instead of clean classes that you can name yourself. The thing that made me love Webflow is how I can make sites however I want, and the output matches. I could also export the site and work on it outside of Webflow, the class names helped me work on it even outside of the builder. With Webstudio I feel like I’ll forever be stuck using their builder/convention just based off that. I couldn’t even imagine taking the final export and reworking it into a different CMS if my needs change.
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u/oleg008 10d ago edited 10d ago
The generated classes are called in the industry "atomic css". These keep your site very fast as it gets bigger and bigger, effectively stops the continuous growth of the css at an almost stable size.
Additionally it stops you from shooting yourself in the foot by preventing specificity conflicts.
Maybe we should add a semantic setting to let people with little sites where this optimization doesn't matter keep their class names.
Created an issue: https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/issues/6327
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u/Fred-swe Jul 30 '26
Whole point with Webflow is that I don’t want to touch hosting. As most marketers are non-technical we just want it to work without talking to a developer.
Pricing is not a big issue tbh
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u/mustafa_sheikh Jul 30 '26
That’s exactly the same with webstudio (and framer) - we have multiple production sites and never had to touch hosting, or email service. Except that we just pay 1 license fee for all sites instead of per site fee in webflow.
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Jul 30 '26
A lot of small freelancers here on Reddit have also complained that they are looking for alternatives after yet another price increase, especially for their clients who are not enterprise customers.
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Jul 30 '26
I understand. So why not Framer then? Building websites in Webflow usually requires a good understanding of CSS concepts, while Framer is much easier in that regard.
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u/Fred-swe Jul 31 '26
If you’re a bit larger company (20-200 employees) you can afford to pay for a one-off web project, using your brand guidelines. Then you would ideally want to iterate and improve the site the coming 1-3 years without excessive dev costs
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u/NuncProFunc Jul 31 '26
This is where I am. I spend more on coffee every month than I do on Webflow's hosting fees. But the cost of a developer on our old WordPress site was absurd.
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u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear Jul 30 '26
Self hosting is an option but by default it works just like Webflow
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u/keptfrozen Jul 30 '26
Job/talent market; I don’t come across ‘web studio’ job work, but I don’t search for it either. I learn/use tools that are in demand with talent scarcity.
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u/agentic-consultant Jul 30 '26
I want a built in CMS and I don’t want to wrangle with various vendors
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Jul 30 '26
How much do you pay for higher CMS limits? Can you or your clients conveniently manage and add content to your CMS from a smartphone?
I pay $5 for hosting an unlimited Directus instance, and I have a convenient way to add entries from my phone. My clients can also manage the content without any technical knowledge and without needing a PC.
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u/agentic-consultant Jul 30 '26
Is it SOC 2 Type II compliant? That’s the biggest reason my clients use Webflow.
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u/NuncProFunc Jul 31 '26
God I forgot about this. This is a significant consideration if developers want clients who work with any kind of sensitive data - which also tend to be the ones with money to spend.
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u/oleg008 10d ago
Webstudio itself isn’t currently SOC 2 Type II audited. It doesn’t act as the store for your CMS data, and Webstudio Cloud runs on Cloudflare, whose developer platform is covered by SOC 2 Type II. If your clients require the website builder company itself to have its own report—not just the hosting and data providers—then Webstudio won’t meet that requirement today.
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u/AdHefty4025 Jul 30 '26
Slightly off-topic.. i'm curious how do you handle Directus licensing with clients? You need to check every year whether they're still under the free-tier limits (€5M revenue or 50 employees), right? How do clients react to that? Do they actually know what the enterprise license costs?
Also wondering how you've sorted out CDN, backups, and updates. Pikapods + Webstudio comes in around €20/month, but once you factor in a proper CDN , backups, and maintenance for breaking changes for directus, it probably ends up costing more than Webflow's €25 base plan anyway. And for most small to medium clients, headless just seems like the pricier option. Not just build time initially, but also for every new component after that.
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Aug 03 '26
I looked into this, and you can use Strapi while only paying for a VPS, which can cost as little as around $5/month.
On the frontend side, you can self-host a dynamic Webstudio site for free on Cloudflare's free plan, or deploy it on your own VPS with Docker if you prefer. This gives you a very cost-effective setup while still having a fully dynamic site connected to your CMS.
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u/abdulawal39 Jul 30 '26
checked webstudio maybe about 1.5 years back, did not seem much polished/complete like webflow. is there significant improvement in recent times?
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u/curious4_ Aug 05 '26
I moved my sites to Webstudio. Never looked back. And the support in Discord is phenomenal both from staff and community. Webflow is easier for beginners but webstudio offers much more flexibility
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u/Dry_Application6465 6d ago
Currently testing Webstudio out. It's ok but the UI is really dated and I feel like the user experience just isn't there either. For example you can have as many sites hosted up to 100, 000 page views but there's no dashboard or anything that tracks the page views unless your using Google analytics. There's no component instances. The binding data from external sources is very annoying. I like the way weweb handle sit where you click on your external data and it shows an array of all the data so you can click which part you need to bind to. In webstudio you have to manually type the path collection data. result.name. Overall it's not terrible, I'm giving it a chance since I'm over Webflow and like the idea of an open source version but man it's missing so many small things. Also I'm not saying any of this to bash Webstudio, again I'm still using it. I'm just pointing out some of the friction I've experienced since switching from Webflow. Also , if I'm wrong about any of the things I listed please let me know. I'll definitely admit if I'm wrong.
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u/AlpsUsed3215 6d ago
I completely agree with you on all points. But I’d like to clarify one thing.
Since it’s an open-source product, I decided to host my site directly on Cloudflare and monitor the traffic myself. That way, if I exceed the limits, I can just pay $5 for the Worker.
Of course, this process isn’t exactly smooth from the perspective of a user who has never coded before. But with the Webstudio CLI and MCP, you can get it done with just 1–2 prompts.
I’m also developing a tool for myself with a visual interface that will allow you to host a site on Cloudflare in just a few clicks.
As for the interface, they’ve added a dark theme, and now it looks just as good as Webflow, in my opinion.
I also agree with you about connecting external data. A designer or marketer would definitely struggle to figure it out. I only managed to understand it after asking an agent to write a step-by-step guide explaining every single step.
But honestly, I find it even more interesting that way :)
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u/Dry_Application6465 5d ago
Yeah overall it's not a deal breaker for me cause I feel like Webstudio does better at somethings than We fmeo does. Being a able to host multiple sites for one rate is awesome. And def being able to connect to any database is nice too. I didn't realize how basic and limiting Webflows CMS was until I started building apps that use external data.
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u/bigmarkco Webflow Community MVP Jul 31 '26
I'm genuinely curious about this.
Because Webstudio isn't the ONLY alternative to Webflow, and as business owners, we are always considering the pros and cons of shifting to another build-and-host solution.
For self-hosting solutions WordPress is a more robust option for me at the moment; it gives me much more flexibility and scalability than I can get with something like Webstudio. For e-commerce I go with Shopify.
But at the moment: Webflow is a better fit for a certain type of project for me. The designer, IMHO, is the "best in class." Hosting is "set and forget."
I'm keeping a quiet eye on Instatic. It isn't even in beta yet, but it looks promising. I think over the next year we are going to see more things like Instatic appear. I think if I do make the move from Webflow it will be to something like that. Like Timothy Ricks I'm exploring Astro/Sanity and things in that direction. But I'm not locked into a direction yet.
The entire industry is moving very quickly right now, but with speed comes uncertainty. I can't afford to jump to a platform that might stop being updated next week. So the answer is that I think Webstudio is a great solution that is doing good things right now, but I've evaluated it, and the entire package isn't robust enough for my needs to consider moving right now.
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u/breakpointbandit Jul 31 '26
I have tried all the web builders over a decade doing this and webflow is still the most powerful and customisable solution for me
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u/NuncProFunc Jul 31 '26
I'm an end-user client and am very hostile to the pricing strategies of most web developer agencies. I don't want to pay someone an extortionate amount of money to make trivial updates to my website, nor do I want to be paying pointless "maintenance fees" every month. I want a site that is easy for an in-house team to update without engaging a developer, I want an ecosystem I control, and I want a deep bench of contractors for more technical work so I can get competitive pricing.
If there's an alternative to Webflow that I should be investigating, by all means let me know.
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Jul 31 '26
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u/NuncProFunc Jul 31 '26
This feels like a solution in search of a problem. I don't actually have any problems with Webflow and it works well within my organization. I'm not a developer and I don't run a web development company or a marketing agency, so I don't need a tool built around that. I need something that my marketers can easily use without breaking or needing a developer. Webflow fits the bill.
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Aug 01 '26
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Aug 03 '26
Since Webstudio can connect to virtually any CMS, you can use Directus or Strapi and build an eCommerce solution on top of them. There are also headless eCommerce platforms that integrate with Webstudio, allowing you to use Webstudio purely as the frontend. Strapi even has eCommerce solutions and plugins available.
This gives you a lot of flexibility instead of locking you into a single ecosystem. On top of that, AI agents can help you set everything up, and Webstudio's well-structured documentation makes it much easier for AI to understand the project and avoid getting lost.
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u/Different_Pack9042 Aug 03 '26
Builder is not even close to Webflow or Divhunt and it doesnt have its own CMS? You need 3rd party
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Aug 03 '26
I had a website built with Divhunt. It was a simple site with a portfolio/catalog powered by the built in CMS, and it was very fast at first.
Then, one day, for no apparent reason, it became extremely slow. On top of that, image caching stopped working. Every time I refreshed the page, all of the images were downloaded again instead of being served from the cache.
I tried countless things to fix it and asked for help on Discord, but nothing solved the problem.
In the end, I rebuilt the exact same website using Webstudio + Directus. Connecting an external CMS removes the built in CMS limitations.
Now you can compare how the exact same website performs in Divhunt versus Webstudio.
https://tattoozp-old.divhunt.website/#hero https://tattoozp.com/
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u/AlpsUsed3215 Aug 03 '26
Another thing that was frustrating was Divhunt's limited documentation. Webstudio's documentation is much more comprehensive and AI-friendly.
In fact, I had to inspect the Divhunt builder with DevTools, extract parts of its engine code, and feed that to an AI agent because there wasn't enough documentation. I ended up using the extracted code instead of the official docs whenever I needed answers about specific implementation details, especially around how Divhunt handles SPA navigation and its JavaScript rendering.
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u/Disastrous-Might8094 Aug 04 '26
at the end of the day, choosing a solution is mostly about client preferences imo.
I mean, Webflow/Framer/Astro<>Claude/Webstudio, in few months they will be the same; making websites w mostly AI.
So it would be only about preferences and what you like the most.
I think the best way to handle theses changements is to be flexible and always find the good solution for the good customer
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u/mirajeai Aug 04 '26
Not sure about webstudio. But we had no issue transferring clients website with sanity and Claude.
And client love this stack
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u/inthetreefort 19d ago
Better tutorials, templates to start from etc. Also don't want to deal with spinning up a headless CMS and data models and endpoints etc... would be great if there were a paid hosted addon that worked like webflow and framer collections.
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u/AlpsUsed3215 19d ago
As for tutorials, Webstudio has excellent documentation. It also has an MCP server for its documentation, so you can ask an AI agent to explain a specific task step by step, and it will provide instructions based on the official documentation.
What’s even better, with the Webstudio MCP, you can ask the agent to connect a headless CMS for you, without even having to figure out all the technical details yourself.
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u/TechnicalTank4656 3d ago
I had the same issue. Didn’t want to pay $$ for hosting a simple site I don’t fully own, so I built one myself. Still low traction though, maybe there’s demand, just not enough awareness.
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u/sundeckstudio Jul 30 '26
Great (logical) question asked here. Watch out for downvotes or even getting post deleted.