We build marketing sites on all three of Framer, Webflow, and WordPress depending on what the site has to do. Every month at least one founder asks us which one is "best." The honest answer is that they solve different problems and charging a founder for the wrong one is how you burn twelve months of runway on a site they outgrow.
Here is how we pick.
Framer: design-led, marketing-first, low CMS pressure
Framer wins when the site's job is to look expressive and convert. Landing pages for funded startups. Creator portfolios. Short-tail campaign sites. The design surface is the best of the three and the dev cost of adding bespoke animation is close to zero.
Framer loses when the content volume is high, when the team editing the site is non-technical, or when the site needs deep structured data (think e-commerce, multi-language, headless). We shipped Guiding Elephant on Framer because the site had ten pages, one author, and a design language that wanted room to breathe.
Rough monthly cost: $25 per site per month for the paid tier. Design time is where the real cost lives.
Webflow: structured content, mid-volume, design still matters
Webflow wins when you need a CMS but refuse to ship a site that looks like a CMS. Blogs with real editorial teams. Startup sites with case study libraries. Portfolios with hundreds of entries. The CMS is real, the templating is decent, and the design control is good enough for most marketing sites.
Webflow loses on three things: e-commerce at scale, heavy structured queries, and teams that want to own hosting. The lock-in is real, and the pricing curve gets aggressive above five editors.
Rough monthly cost: $29 to $39 per site per month, plus seats. Budget for a Webflow specialist on the team; it's not as self-serve as the marketing suggests.
WordPress: high content volume, commerce, multiple editors, cost ceiling
WordPress wins when the site is doing a real job that involves a real amount of content, when commerce is on the table, and when the team editing it has five or more seats. WooCommerce handles commerce well enough for most founders; the plugin ecosystem does more than Framer and Webflow combined.
WordPress loses on design freshness, edit-to-publish speed, and the thing nobody admits: maintenance. A WordPress site is a small IT department. Plugins update. Security patches. Hosting matters. We shipped Medicileaf Store on WooCommerce because the client had 200+ SKUs, three editors, and a retainer that could absorb the maintenance.
Rough monthly cost: $15 to $80 per month for hosting, plus plugin subscriptions. The real cost is an hour a week forever.
The decision in one table
- Pages: under 20, mostly marketing, high design bar. → Framer.
- Pages: 20 to 200, editorial team of 1 to 3, structured content, no commerce. → Webflow.
- Pages: 200+, commerce, multiple editors, budget for maintenance. → WordPress.
What we'd do differently
For the first year of SingleBit we defaulted to Webflow for almost everything and suffered for it on two e-commerce builds that should have been WordPress from day one. We now ask the commerce question first, before the design question, because switching later is a rebuild.
Heuristics
- Pick the platform for the job the site has to do in year three, not month three. The cost of switching is roughly equal to the original build.
- If the team can't edit the site without you, you built the wrong thing. Platform choice is about who operates the site after launch.
- Maintenance is a real cost. Price it into the decision. A cheap WordPress site with no maintenance budget is an expensive WordPress site in six months.
Written 2025-03-09 by Naman Barkiya.