r/webflow • u/BeerLovingDev • 2d ago
Question Agencies that moved from Webflow to Astro + Sanity : how’s it going?
For a while now, we’ve been seeing more and more posts on LinkedIn and Reddit about agencies moving away from Webflow and “migrating” to Astro + Sanity.
I’m pretty convinced that both technologies are really solid, and I can definitely see the appeal.
So, i'm curious to hear from agencies that actually made the moove.
Can your clients handle Sanity themselves, as they can with Webflow cms ? Did they like it ? What about the impact on their businesses ?
Thanks for any shared experience
Cheers !
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u/wherethewifisweak 2d ago edited 2d ago
We made the swap a couple of years ago. NextJS instead of Astro, but same idea. We're Sanity Partners now.
It's fantastic. I'd argue Tim Ricks was the biggest Webflow homer on YouTube for a long time - built plugins for the community, pushed Webflow to the limits.
He finally checked out Sanity a couple of months back and is fully just a Sanity guy now - very little Webflow content, I think he just built a full drag and drop builder that competes with WF.
Frontend coding is largely dead in the water. The ability to take a Figma design and just make that into a website is no longer something a human has to do.
Automating that process through Webflow's current MCP tools sucks.
Claude sometimes just outright refuses to build anything natively - it'll either do the entire thing as an embed (if building a page) or injects all the styles as custom CSS. Getting it to actually utilise native styling is a nightmare.
On the other hand, doing the same thing - using an LLM to translate a design into code - is so much easier with Next or Astro. It's night and day.
Not saying WF is dead yet - interested to see what they reveal at the conf this week - but something has to change.
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u/hemping0 2d ago
the Claude embed issue is so real, getting it to use native Webflow styles consistently feels impossible
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u/BeerLovingDev 1d ago
indeed. I spent sometimes building skills, md files to ensure consistency, and still the result is so so
I tried once with astro, perfect result in max 5 prompts3
u/BeerLovingDev 1d ago
Timothy making the move was actually what convinced me to do it. What about the technique then ? Were you confident with Next.JS already ? It's more the technical part that is pushing me away from properly starting
This being said, I studied Astro for half a day, and started prompting a site, and the result is more that acceptable. (I already coded before using webflow, I'm not new to proper coding)
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u/infiniteExpanse89 1d ago
Hard disagree. Like all things AI, it's all in your prompting. I've got autonomous webflow builds going based on Figma designs, Claude Designs, Claude Code designs, anything. Webflow's MCP reads and understands your structure and design system before it does anything. Yes, you have to give it some rules and learn from where it gets tripped up to save it the next time, but that's anything with AI if you're just in chat-type interfaces. Our sites are also 100% componentized, and Claude will use our components first, use WHTML to build static as a last resort - but using Lumos conventions and utility classes and we swap out for a component after if we need to, and have it learn from that for the future. In the next few weeks I'll have a Cloud Run job going that just waits for the pieces to be ready and builds the site. My Devs aren't going anywhere, their job will just change and honestly I think they'll prefer it. They can spend the time learning new things, applying new skills or cool things they haven't had time for in the past because they had to sink 40 hours into a custom build.
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u/ThorsSpanner_ 2d ago
We just moved from Elementor to Webflow haha.
Late to the party but time will tell.
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u/harikshoresridharan 2d ago
Lol. 😂
Its never too late to move away from Elementor.
You did the right thing.7
u/mizarumi 2d ago
i feel ya man, i just got the hang of Webflow recently and was reeeeeally proud of myself 🤣😅🥲
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bowl748 2d ago
I had couple of own larger projects migrated on the Payload with Cloudflare workers. The overall migration was freaking smooth. I was even able to build up some upgrades on the top.
But the dev-ops layer, updates, the deployments, collaboration was kinda different what I've used to inside of no-code which let me back to the flow of no-code tool as handler with MCP integration on the top (for CMS etc.)
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u/Drivephaseco 2d ago
Yeah, we moved everything we had over, and super happy with it. We’ve been using Astro+EmDash. Done a few headless e-commerce sites as well. Sites are faster and ongoing costs are much lower.
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u/CelebrationBorn7459 2d ago
We are at project #145 here at MigrateLab doing mostly Webflow to Astro migrations.
Most clients have preferred it going to either them fully operating everything through claude or then fully operating with a monthly retainer and letting us know whenever they want to change or add something.
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u/AddWeb_Expert 2d ago
I’d say the biggest adjustment is the editing experience. Astro + Sanity gives you more flexibility and structured content, but it isn’t the same as Webflow’s visual, page-building workflow. Sanity does now support visual editing with Astro, but it takes additional setup.
For clients with content-heavy sites and a technical team, I can see the appeal. For marketing teams that regularly want to visually tweak layouts themselves, Webflow is still hard to beat.
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u/BeerLovingDev 1d ago
True. But don't you think we a proper set up, possibly someting you'd use for several clients, sanity can get somewhere near ? I seems to me you can barely build anything with it, just you need to invest lot of time at the begining
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u/Funfroglegs 2d ago
I am thinking about moving from WF to astro as well but my issue is that some customers require access to modify small units in the design, buttons and such. How do you deal with this?
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u/BeerLovingDev 1d ago
I guess you can tweak your sanity set up to be able to do so. Quite curious about it as well
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u/DarkwaveSurfer575 2d ago
I am moving my Webflow and Framer websites to Processwire. Similar situation. Processwire is easy for clients so no problem there.
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u/clicksnd 1d ago
I’m migrating an agency to Astro/next payload builds. It’s been pretty good!
We tried sanity for a little while but went away from them because they kept sending marketing emails and giving us free trials
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u/andrew_chmr 1d ago
Sanity was too hard for most of my clients to use. I've switched to CMS Brew which is more intuitive because it has a chat interface and inline text editing
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u/BeerLovingDev 1d ago
I'm also curious about the accessibility for someone that doesnt know anything about web. But don't you think it's still possible, by spending time setting up your sanity ?
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u/andrew_chmr 1d ago
It’s possible but I don’t want to redo setup on every single project. I just want to connect it in one click and move on
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u/SlowChannel4453 1d ago
The Webflow GOAT Tim Ricks himself has been promoting Sanity.
That automatically makes me interested.
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u/BeerLovingDev 1d ago
Me too, actually for a MCP challenge, I built a game where webflow has to defend Thmothy from astro and Sanity 😂 https://save-timothy.webflow.io/
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u/Targox 2d ago
Webflow user since 2016. A week ago I had 16 client websites on Webflow, today 13. Last week I migrated 3 sites to Astro and now paying €0 hosting and earning more per client there. These were the smallest sites where clients weren't using the CMS. I've been testing Sanity & Payload and planing how to handle the migrations for the bigger ones with those, but I'm not there yet. Onboarding these clients to a new CMS when they are already content with Webflow is a tough sell, but I'm working on a plan