There has been a debate in the startup community on this topic for quite a long time. I am not an expert in these tools. We had an opportunity to put together the opinions and experience of various CXOs.
We have put together their comments with minor changes in the copy. Efforts have been made to keep their opinion original.
Hamad From Pazo warns that Webflow may have no code but has a steep learning curve. Ideal for people who have some HTML/CSS/JS experience. Best way to get started is buy a bunch of themes and then customize. Building something from scratch is very difficult.
Another marketing with focus on sales and marketing shares that with Webflow, your billing will blow up if you have 500-1000 plus articles, form fillings of 100+ signups. SEO is harder to perform as well, ON Page specifically.
Kashi from Fitbots makes it clear that It’s not about Webflow or not Webflow. It’s about managing CMS vs building your own. Most silicon valley startups have moved to Webflow or CMS one prime reason is that it’s faster, cheaper and better to scale when you have a small dev team. In the growth stage it’s the rate of experimentation … If your team can keep up with it supporting marketing, continue what works for you else using managed services.
Kashi continues to add that Webflow never means no development support… Front end needs knowledge of CSS and UI/UX it just means faster time to market for certain use cases.
Vinit from Hellotars.com provides his experience and believe me it comes from his experience.
We have been using Notion as our CMS, but with a custom frontend developed using Next.js frontend.We have done it for one part of our website. That is Chatbot template pages. Rest is still in WordPress. It does require one dedicated developer to work on the website full time. As a result, we have full control over the design, SEO, page speed. Using Notion as the CMS decouples the marketing and engineering team, as any new post can be published directly on Notion by the marketing team.I am starting to like this approach, because we have been able to add totally new features in these pages very quickly. Like adding JSON-LD data format for SERP, adding Chatbot screenshots as thumbnails, etc.
This approach is definitely more resource intensive. As you need a dedicated developer for this. But this goes along with the idea of building a website as a product. Our main WordPress website still looks like dogshit, and there is lots of design, copy and messaging work needed to fix it. Using a better WordPress theme will be a faster way to fix it. But with a limited control over design and SEO optimizations.
Using new technologies like Next.js has helped a lot. E.g. The page speed on these pages is very good and feels very fast while navigating.
We use Notion internally as our Knowledge base and for Project management. We found it super easy to use and has all the things we need. So keeping it as a CMS is a natural choice for us. It also has very nice APIs to work with.
I have looked into Strapi and a few other Headless CMS, but honestly nothing else compares to the UI/UX of Notion.
Arun from Recotap shares that we use Ghost for our blog and plan to move the main website also to Ghost.
Vivek Saini from QDC provides his comparison in a quite objective manner here, I know that he has done it both ways so his insights are special.
Vinay from OceanFrogs believes from his experiences that web designers will always favor webflow because they prefer it over wordpress.
Questions that one should ask is:
