Framer vs Webflow: Which tool to choose?

It's crucial for companies to create exceptional online experiences in order to consolidate their presence and stand out from the competition. Web design and development play a central role in this, and choosing the right tools is essential to guarantee optimal results.

In this article, we'll take a close look at the capabilities of these platforms to create quality websites. Whether you want to create a professional website or an interactive prototype, this comparison will guide you in choosing the tool best suited to your needs.

What is Framer?

Framer is a European Nocode website development solution based in the Netherlands. The platform was created in 2016. Framer offers great speed of use when creating and allows you to publish your design instantly, without the need to code or use any other additional tool. This means you can get results very quickly, dramatically reducing the time it takes to get your site online and keeping you nimble in your creative process.

What's more, its user-friendly, intuitive interface facilitates the creation of attractive, functional designs and animation tools, offering unprecedented accessibility for those new to web development.

As you can see, its user interface is reminiscent of Figma... to the delight of web designers.

Framer benefits

Framer is ideal for creating interactive prototypes and complex animations. It offers advanced customization and directly accessible integrations. Real-time collaboration is facilitated, making this tool suitable for teams. Framer has a relatively simple learning curve.

Disadvantages of Framer

It offers no integrated e-commerce features. The platform offers limited customer support, only on Slack and Discord.

From a technical point of view, it is not yet possible to create relationships between collections or to create advanced visibility conditions. This could slow down some advanced web development experts.

What is Webflow?

Webflow is a Nocode tool that lets you design, build and publish websites in an intuitive interface. The platform also offers robust hosting and e-commerce features, making it a truly complete solution. It's an efficient way to bring ideas to life without the need to code.

Benefits of Webflow

Webflow offers a variety of templates and a powerful integrated CMS, making it easy to create and manage complete, dynamic websites. E-commerce functionalities are robust and user-friendly. The platform is enhanced by the Webflow University, which offers a wealth of educational resources for users of all levels.

Webflow has been designed with web developers in mind, pushing back year after year the bottlenecks found in nocode vs. traditional code.

Disadvantages of Webflow

The learning curve can be complex for beginners, as the tool really does offer a great deal of flexibility. Webflow does not allow real-time collaboration on the same project, which can slow down development for large teams.

Framer and Webflow, feature comparison

‍Template

Framer offers a range of templates, with around 150 free and paid templates, while Webflow offers a much more extensive library with over 2,000 templates, including over 1,000 paid templates. 

Framer's limitation in terms of templates is partly explained by the fact that the solution is still in its infancy on the market.

User Interface & Customization

Webflow (like Framer) features a drag-and-drop interface that greatly simplifies the design process, making it accessible to designers and developers alike. This enables rapid implementation of ideas and concepts, reducing the time needed to go from initial idea to working prototype or website.

The platforms also offer the possibility of integrating custom code into your projects, giving you the flexibility to personalize and enrich the functionality of your designs.

Webflow stands out as a sophisticated tool with a longer learning curve than its competitor. With the "Visual CSS grid", users can create complex grid structures with multiple rows and columns, adjust the size and spacing of each grid element, and even add custom breakpoints to optimize the layout for different screen sizes.

Framer also offers "stacks" (Webflow's equivalent of flexboxes) and "grids" customization. But the tool is simpler by design, and doesn't offer the possibility of creating classes and variables - which are quite complicated to use from a methodological point of view.

On the other hand, Framer stands out for its user-friendly interface. It's designed to be intuitive and accessible, even for beginners in the field of web design. It enables users to create highly personalized, interactive prototypes. That said, a solid grounding in design and tools such as Sketch or Figma will enable you to take your projects to the next level.

Resources and community

Framer offers documentation, community forums and tutorials on Framer Academy as the main means of support for its users.

On the other hand, Webflow benefits from a very large and active user community. Webflow's main advantage is its Webflow University, with more content and detail than Framer. The platform offers free detailed tutorials, guides and challenges to help users learn and perfect their skills interactively.

SEO and Performance 

Webflow and Framer offer ease of use for many key SEO tasks. Users can easily edit page titles, URLs and meta-descriptions, add alt tags to images, set up 301 redirects, edit schema markup and automatically generate sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and design fully responsive pages. This means that both platforms are effective in optimizing your site's SEO, ensuring that they are not only aesthetically appealing but also functional and optimized for search engines.

Webflow provides a rich library of over 250 integrations, significantly extending your site's functionality.

Framer is equipped with a variety of directly accessible integrations, including HubSpot and Calendly, as well as Webflow. For those with a command of JavaScript and React, Framer's component creation tool offers the ability to add and customize integrations according to specific project needs. A feature much appreciated by Web Designers and Front-End Developers in their community.

On the other hand, Framer is equipped with built-in analysis tools for each website, which comply with privacy standards. This means that users can track and analyze visitor traffic and behavior on their site while respecting privacy regulations and expectations.

At Alegria.solutions we're used to working with both Nocode solutions, and the impact on our customers' SEO is very often a key issue. Find out how the redesign of the Welkeys site has improved SEO and, above all, increased the number of bookings.

E-commerce

Webflow distinguishes itself from its e-commerce competitor. It offers a variety of features dedicated to building and managing an online store. Users can customize product pages, manage inventory, track orders and integrate payment processing with popular platforms such as Stripe and PayPal. This makes Webflow a complete solution for those looking to combine web design with reliable e-commerce functionality.

Framer, on the other hand, focuses primarily on prototyping and the creation of dynamic user interfaces. It does not integrate e-commerce functionalities. That said, you can always integrate payment solutions such as Stripe via custom code.

Security

Framer sets itself apart by providing a robust, encrypted environment for hosting projects, ensuring their security. The platform enables flexible access management thanks to a role-based control system, allowing administrators to assign specific access levels to team members. In addition, Framer ensures the protection of sensitive data through highly secure transfer and storage mechanisms. The platform also provides SSL certificates.

Webflow, focuses on secure communications by providing automatic SSL certificates for all sites hosted on its platform like Framer. It is designed to offer effective protection against a variety of vulnerabilities and attacks, guaranteeing website security. The company is also committed to maintaining security through a robust hosting infrastructure and regular updates to counter emerging threats.

So to sum up, both tools are solid on this subject.

Learning curves

Framer is much more accessible than Webflow. Efficient use of its advanced features nevertheless requires a thorough understanding of the platform. However, its interface, which is very reminiscent of Figma, may be familiar to designers, making it easier for them to adapt to the tool. Since Framer is a more recent tool, it's important to note that there are fewer resources, such as user-created tutorial videos, to aid learning.

On the other hand, Webflow can be complex for novices, but fortunately, resources like Webflow University, an active community and responsive customer support are available to help overcome these challenges. These resources provide valuable guides, tutorials and support for navigating through the complexities of the platform.

Collaborative

Framer's ability to collaborate in real time on the same project makes it particularly well-suited to teams. This feature enables several people to contribute simultaneously to the design, coding and testing of a prototype, facilitating communication and coordination between team members.

On Webflow, it's not possible for 2 people to edit the same site at the same time. At most, one person can edit content while another works on the design of a page. For large projects, this can slow down development.

CMS & Blogging

Webflow is the winner here. Its CMS is very powerful and offers many more features than Framer, such as the ability to create relationships between several collections, or to create databases with more field types available.

Framer also has a CMS section that's still very good, but can be blocking when you want to build more complex pages.

Animation

Framer specializes in the creation of complex animations, surpassing Webflow in this field. Complex interactions, interaction triggers and cinematic effects can be designed. Users can also take advantage of Framer Motion, a React-specific library, to create unique animation styles.

Webflow, while not as advanced as Framer when it comes to animations, nevertheless offers a variety of tools for creating animated, interactive websites. Users can associate animations with cursor position, revealing content as the user scrolls or hovers the mouse over specific elements, making the user experience more immersive and engaging. Webflow is also integrated with the3D design tool Spline.

Customer support

Webflow's e-mail support service is available Monday to Friday, with the aim of providing customized answers within 24 to 48 working hours. Their live phone support is only available to users with the Enterprise plan. It's also important to note that Webflow support is provided in English only.

For its part, Framer does not have an ongoing support service. Users can create a ticket to report problems or suggest improvements, and can also contact support by e-mail for questions related to accounts and billing. In addition, Framer offers an official Discord channel where users can chat, ask questions and get help from the Framer community. It should be noted that private support on Slack is reserved exclusively for users of a Custom Business plan.

Price

Framer offers a free plan and paid plans for individuals, as well as team plans for collaborating on the same project at the same time.

Like its competitor, Webflow offers both a free plan and paid plans. The platform also offers specific e-commerce plans ranging from $42 to $235 per month.

Comparative table

Conclusion: Which tool to choose?

The choice between Webflow and Framer largely depends on the user's specific needs and skills. Webflow stands out for its wealth of templates, integrated CMS and robust e-commerce functionality, making it ideal for those looking to build and manage complete websites with relative ease. What's more, Webflow University offers a wealth of resources to help even beginners navigate the world of web design.

On the other hand, Framer excels at creating interactive prototypes and complex animations. Although it offers fewer templates and lacks integrated e-commerce functionality, its ability to create highly personalized, interactive designs makes it attractive to designers and developers with an inclination for customization and innovation.

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