In this post, we are going to compare Webflow vs WordPress as both are content management systems. We will compare both website builders on the basis of their pros and cons and the features they provide. Finally, you will decide which one’s better.
More chances for you to choose WordPress are because it is the best-known website builder. Also, it is the popular one among both as more than 34% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
Webflow and WordPress Overview
Before starting, we will try to get an overview WordPress vs Webflow of both the content management systems in brief:
Both WordPress and Webflow are website builders. WordPress is older than Webflow and is in use for the last 17 years. It is highly popular among businesses, bloggers, designers, and developers.
Webflow, on the other hand was started in 2013 and is growing its users steadily since then. It offers a fully hosted and visual WordPress alternative to general users and designers.
WordPress (www.wordpress.com)
WordPress is an open source and free software. It means anyone can use and download to make a personal online store, business website and or blog. Starting with WordPress requires you a web hosting and domain name. Internet is full of WordPress hosting providers which are super easy and provide 1-click installation.
Key features of WordPress
- Accessible and easy
- High security
- High performance
- Mobile responsive sites
- Powerful media management
- Mobile apps for site management
- SEO friendly
- Customizable designs
- Large community
- More than 54,000 plugin options
Webflow (www.webflow.com)
Webflow is also a website builder which is easy to use. It offers a web designing tool which is visual. Webflow is a service software. They offer selling services of hosting, upgrades, and paid features to make money. After making a Webflow account you can connect it directly to domain name or create a free Webflow subdomain like we have done. Meanwhile, you can get the website hosting from any other host after downloading the website from Webflow.
Key features of Webflow:
- Flexbox support
- Responsive page designs
- Ecommerce support
- Intuitive editor
- Drag and drop page builder
- ISO 27018 and SSL
- Publish straight to web
- Typography customization
- Integrating backups, marketing tools and form data
- Zapier integrations
- Code editor
- Export code for download
Webflow vs WordPress
One of the great alternatives to WordPress is Webflow. Before getting into the in-depth comparison let us find out the parameter that we should look for before choosing a website platform.
Now that we have got an overview of both platforms, let’s talk about their differences and actual comparison among Webflow vs WordPress features:
1. Support
Occasional help is desirable by everyone. We can have a look at the support system provided by both WordPress and Webflow
Webflow Support
Webflow includes a huge collection of tutorials and articles in Webflow University. They include step-by-step articles, how-to-guide and video tutorials. Also these elements cover a huge range of niches.
It also offers support through email with the availability from 6 am to 6 pm for Monday to Friday. It does not offer support with live chat but has an AL driven chatbot. Webflow also maintains a support forum which welcomes queries from webflow staff, experts and users.
WordPress Support
WordPress is an open source software driven by the community with free support to the community.
Even a simple Google search can answer you simple questions about WordPress. In case of visual help, they provide you with WordPress video tutorials. In case of more help needed, you are provided with a developer. Small businesses can equally get help in a super easy way in the presence of developers.
Conclusion-Support
WordPress offers more system support. It can be through a third part developer who would offer any language.
The paid plans are in premium. The support services in Webflow are limited. However, the support services are also limited to email support. Moreover, you get options to manage the only spent and beautifully managed costs.
Webflow includes very fantastic, support, integration, flexibility and CMS features. Nevertheless, it is a fantastic tool of web design
2. Ease of use
Most of the users who start are not coders or programmers. Therefore, there has to be an easy to use platform without paying attention to help. It means millions of users from the whole world are different at their level of skill.
Webflow ease of use
The Webflow dashboard is easy to manage because of clean features. It has a visual interface where you can design layouts and add your content followed by having a live preview.
Webflow has multiple templates which you can edit for your specific project. Visual editor helps you edit them accordingly. It offers multiple features which may be overwhelming for beginners.
You can click or point to any available change options. The “add new” element button helps adding new elements from the panel on the left. It is highly suitable for developers and designer. Moreover, for a content publisher some of the options may be insufficient such as comments, discussion, and tags and categories.
WordPress ease of use
WordPress is easy to use with a slight learning curve. Beginners have to keep them familiarize on themselves with concepts such as posts vs pages, difference, plugin, and theme. Likewise, it makes the intuitive visual bar which is known as block editor.
You can customize the content in the blocks with block editor. With the help of these blocks, you can create your own pages with the customized content user. You can create a very beautiful layout without even adding any code.
Even if you want to edit default editor. The drag and drop page builder which are available in the form of add-ons will also help in edit.
You can either start with a ready-made layout and then changing it according to your requirements or you can completely personalise it from scratch.
WordPress provides you with over 57,000 plugins and hundreds of templates. These features give you an authority to do whatever you want with your website without coding.
Conclusion – Ease of use
Both Webflow and WordPress have ready to start layouts and templates.
The default editor in Webflow is easier to use but the learning curve with Webflow is similar to WordPress. WordPress, on the other hand, allows you to use page builder in place of the default editor according to your need.
A great WordPress Page builder for example is Elementor.
Webflow provides less number of options for categories and tags with no comment feature. If you try to add content, the design element limits you. It makes Webflow a bit difficult CMS in terms of publishing content. Thus, WordPress is better.
3. Integrations and Add-ons
Not every website builder holds all the features at a time. This is the reason it uses third-party tools to extend its services and integrations. Let’s find out how Webflow and WordPress handle integrations and add-ons.
Webflow Addons & Plugins
Webflow seamlessly offers limited integrations with the services offered by the third part. Most of the integrations require you to follow the demo tutorial in order to connect them to your project. However, other integrations may offer you out of the box experience.
The integrations may also affect negatively if you switch hosting service. Such as, the new hosting may not support forms and you will need to find ways to fix them.
WordPress Addons & Plugins
WordPress plugins empower WordPress in real means. These act like apps for a website. Moreover, you can install them to simply extend the website features.
WordPress has over 57,000 + plugins. It may exceed on the basis of premium plugins. The features offered by these plugins include security, backups, SEO features, installing Google Analytics, and contact form etc.
WordPress invites all the third party tools and services which may help growing businesses. WordPress has all the popular plugins that you may need to establish and grow your website from business phone services, to help desk, live chat software, and email marketing.
Conclusion-Integrations and add-ons
WordPress is clearly better here that offers support to all types of third-party plugins services and tools.
4. E-Commerce
E-commerce allows you using your website as a web store to sell items. Most of the businesses can have a vigorous businesses to run and grow with E-commerce.
Webflow as Ecommerce
Webflow makes it easy to run an online business in terms of website design, scaling businesses and selling products. It gives you a complete control on your website. All the pages are equally customized either it’s the product page or checkout page.
Unlike other page builders, checkout page can be as good as the other pages of your website. It gives the best customer experience as well. Even the transactional emails can be customized which are sent to the clients for purchase confirmations.
The payments of products from the customers uses all popular methods of payments. It includes PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay and Stripe. You can select the shipment place and shipment methods with shipping regions and rules.
Zapier integration helps you here to easily and quickly print your labels of shipment with order management dashboard.
WordPress as Ecommerce
WordPress makes it very easy to set up an online store. The free WooCommerce plugin is easy to install. In fact, any other free ecommerce plugin works fine with WordPress.
However, WooCommerce is the most popular one. Of all the online stores, WooCommerce powers 28% of the total. It is easy to use and reliable. Not to mention, it’s FREE.
WooCommerce is fully customizable so designing is unlimited. It offers thousands of templates for store designing or you can custom design if you want.
WooCommerce also offers paid and free extensions. Thus, you can install everything of your choice ranging from shipment to payment or processing. It makes WooCommerce a very flexible platform.
Conclusion – Ecommerce
Again, WordPress provides the most flexible platform so that you can sell anything of your choice. It gives no restrictions, add-ons and payment options on the number of products to add.
Any ecommerce plugin or WooCommerce can be used in the start. You are also free to switch to any other hosting without damaging anything on your website.
Webflow, on the contrary, charges transaction fee and is expensive. It also limits the listing of the products with fewer integrations and features.
5. Templates and design
Anyone making a website is not a designer too. You will require a design tool if you’re a beginner. However, the end result will be highly different from a professionally designed website.
Webflow Templates (Themes)
Webflow gives you full control over JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5 which allows you use visual page builder. Here you can create anything of your choice. Once, a perfect website is created, it is directly uploaded or downloaded with the code and passed to the developers.
There is a drag and drop interface on the Webflow. It means, you have a blank canvas to start with. Simply, drag and drop the elements like images, tabs, sliders or background videos to your desired places. Navigator shows the structure of your website so you can restructure with a few clicks.
All the elements and pages are highly responsive and you can still adjust the layouts for the required devices. It ensures that your users have best experience irrespective of the device type they use.
It further gives a full control over typography. You are free to choose any font and customize everything related to it. You can also adopt colour swatches that allows you to customize anything any moment with just a single click. It provides perfect consistency on all of your pages.
Here you can find a collection of the best webflow templates.
WordPress Templates (Themes)
WordPress provides you thousands of WordPress themes. Most of these themes are entirely free and mobile friendly. They provide an out of the box experience to the users. You can choose any of these WordPress themes to start with.
These themes can be changed later. They are highly customizable and easy to use with the live customizer in WordPress.
The design elements in WordPress are kept separate which keeps the design consistent. You can select a theme and then to create a landing page you can use page builder. These page builders are equipped with professionally designed templates.
Specular Theme helps you design your own theme if you cannot find a theme of your choice from the WordPress catalog. These themes are used without coding.
Conclusion – Design and templates
Disregarding the functionality and content from the design shows that WordPress is far better to offer flexible designs than Webflow. WordPress also gives a vast experience of editing tools and designs to customize the website’s appearance as a whole.
6. Costs
The cost of a website may be an important factor for website builders. To start an online business, the user prefers to keep the costs as low as possible so that more investment is made on growing business.
Webflow Pricing
Webflow provides a limited version of free which allows you create and host a website with subdomain and branding.
There are two paid plans; account plans and site plans. Site plans are prices according to the site. It lets you to use your personal domain name. It charges you according to the type of website.
The costs of plans are divided into Enterprise levels, Business, CMS and Basic. Each level adds new feature and increase charges.
There is an additional category of Ecommerce Plans in Site plans which helps you in online store at multiple levels. The starting cost of Site plans is as low as $16 per month. The eCommerce plans start with $29 per month.
The account plans allow you run multiple websites side by side. You can get the code or host them from the third party.
WordPress Pricing
WordPress is free. However, hosting and domain name charges fee. If you intend to purchase a premium plugin or theme, then too you will be charged. Any service from third party also require payments.
Usually it costs only $14.99 for a domain per year. The hosting packages cost $7.99 per month. Well, yes it’s not cheap for a starter.
Conclusion – Costs
All the features cost much cheaper with WordPress than with the Webflow. Free plugins are also provided to add any additional feature into the website. No additional cost is charged on creating an online store with WordPress.
However, the cost of WordPress website will increase with the increasing traffic on the website. Yet, before upgrading hosting you can hold and allow your business grow. Later, you can purchase premium add-ons to increase traffic and worth of your website.
Conclusion – Webflow vs WordPress – Which is better in 2021?
From the above analysis, we can clearly state that WordPress is far better than Webflow.
There are more ecommerce options, support flexibility and design options in a lower cost. Even that you can control spending when and where needed.
Webflow gives an outstanding appearance with an extraordinary design tool. Nevertheless, support, integrations, flexibility, and CMS features are very limited.
As a beginner that wants to create a website fast & easily within a few clicks and without configuring hosting, I recommend Webflow. If you want a more scalable and professional website for sure you need to use WordPress.
You can read the article again if you feel any doubt about our interpretation. Choose the best content management system for your website.
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