9/5/24
7 min
General Overview
Even though this is something you might be familiar with, it’s essential that we cover the basics so you can understand the key differences.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a CMS platform that proudly holds the spot as the most popular option in the world of website building.
There are two versions:
- Hosted WordPress: a less popular option that offers multiple features that come along with CMS such as website hosting, email hosting, domain name registry, and more.
- Self-hosted WordPress: an open-source software that one can install on its own hosting and use for free.
The self-hosted solution is far more popular as it offers much more flexibility is free.
In this post, we’re going to focus on a self-hosted WordPress solution, and how building a website with it differs from building a website with Webflow.
What is Webflow?
Webflow is a visual website builder, where CMS is just one of its core features.
It was launched in 2012 but it gained respectable traction around 2020. TechCrunch's report shows that Webflow’s valuation almost doubled from 2021 to 2022, which means that in the last couple of years, the platform gained a lot of popularity in the web design and development space.
The main idea behind Webflow is that you can create websites without writing a single line of code.
Truth is, WordPress can do that as well, which is also the main reason why we’re creating this post and showing you how they actually differ.
Key Differences Between Webflow and WordPress
Here comes the juicy part.
So we have two website builders where users can create websites without writing a single line of code. Those would be their biggest similarities, but when it comes to differences, there are many.
CMS Model
Even though this difference isn’t a key factor when determining whether is Webflow better than WordPress or the other way around, it’s still an important part of their definition which can help you set up your expectations.
WordPress is an open-source software. It’s basically an application that you download, and deploy to your website. Anything you create on your website is done through that application/software.
If you want additional features on your website, you can browse their directory of plugins and themes, where third-party developers and companies sell their products.
Webflow on the other hand is SaaS. It’s a private company that sells various plans for website building. You can’t download Webflow as an application as it’s not just a visual builder application – Webflow is a full website design and development service that includes various features among which you can choose what suits you best.
Key takeaway: When choosing between Webflow or WordPress, you should know that in case you go with WordPress, you’re getting an open-source free-to-use application that you can install on your hosting, while on the other hand, if you choose Webflow, you’ll basically choose a SaaS company’s product.
Page Builder and Templates
This is one of the biggest differences between WordPress and Webflow – how you actually create pages on your website.
WordPress
WordPress doesn’t have a page builder on its own – it requires that you have a theme installed which then allows you to have a page builder.
Some of the most popular page builders for WordPress websites are Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Beaver Builder, and Avada.
Bear in mind that features, ease of use, performance, design flexibility, and pricing all differ, as these are additions to WordPress created by third-party companies.
WordPress has developed 19 free themes that have page builders but truth be told, they’re nowhere close to the ones mentioned above. Yet, there are over 11,951 free WordPress themes that you can choose from and therefore their page builder.
The biggest benefit of this is possibilities – rough competition keeps working hard on developing new features and if you don’t like the page builder or theme you’re working with, you can simply switch to something else. The same goes for templates.
However, cons are in the majority – if you learn to operate with one theme and page builder, that means you know how to operate on websites running that theme and page builder specifically. For example, if you master building on Divi, there’s no lesser learning curve in learning how to work in Elementor. This represents major restrictions if you’re working with multiple sites with different setups.
Isn’t it a true oxymoron that all that freedom WordPress offers is actually pretty restricting in mastering the bigger picture?
Still, all this depends on the angle – if you’re looking to start just one website and stick to it, you’ll have no problem with it as you’ll need to learn to operate with only one theme and page builder.
Webflow
Webflow works a bit differently, as they don’t support traditional themes and plugins the way WordPress does.
Since Webflow is a SaaS, once you sign up for an account, you’re brought to the main interface where you have the option to start creating or designing websites using The Designer and CMS features.
[IMAGE = can be a screenshot of The Designer]
Webflow offers over 2000 templates (both paid and free) and that number is still growing.
If you prefer to create or design a website from blank, there’s that option as well.
For designing, you’ll need to learn how to use Webflow’s Designer and their CMS – tools where you’ll import data and then put the pieces together and style it.
The biggest benefit of this setup is that once you learn to use The Designer you can navigate through any Webflow website as they all use the same technology which opens many possibilities that we’ll discuss later.
The downside is that even though Webflow’s Designer is pretty intuitive (for advanced users), there’s a learning curve to mastering it (especially for beginners). Luckily, Webflow has a completely free University – anyone can invest time into learning and you don’t have to go through dozens of YouTube videos to learn something.
Design Flexibility
This difference plays a key role for advanced users that need to create more complex designs but it also should be a key thing to consider for beginners from both worlds, as they need to think about future times when they reach an advanced level.
WordPress
WordPress’s design flexibility heavily depends on which theme you pick, but for the sake of comparison, we’ll consider it to be the most advanced out there.
One of the main reasons why WordPress became so popular is because it was basically the first super flexible system for website designing, and over the years its flexibility has kept expanding.
Truth be told, the design possibilities are basically limitless but at a cost that you know how to code and that you’re familiar with advanced programming languages such as JavaScript and PHP. That’s if we’re talking about super advanced and complex design.
It’s achievable, but only being familiar with design is simply not enough.
You can create beautiful websites with no coding, but if you’re not familiar with the entire system and its ins and outs, you might find yourself stuck with performance issues as code builds up in the background.
Webflow
One of the biggest problems the industry had was a fight between designers and developers – designers create amazing things, and developers struggle to implement them.
Many tried to solve this problem with various solutions, but very few along with Webflow were successful – Webflow was initially created for designers.
The idea was that designers shouldn’t need developers to build super complex designs and advanced websites.
Webflow’s design flexibility is actually its biggest strength – there are other platforms out there, such as Wix and Squarespace, but none of them come even close when it comes to possibilities in terms of design freedom.
Just like in the case of WordPress, the downside is a significant learning curve, but at least you don’t have to learn how to code. Webflow builds super-optimized code behind your design, and conflicts are almost impossible.
SEO
What does a nice website serve for if it’s not properly optimized for search engines?!
The SEO game is somewhat similar on these platforms but still, there are a few differences.
WordPress
The best way to make sure your WordPress website is optimized is to install some of the popular SEO plugins such as Rank Math or Yoast SEO.
These plugins save you the trouble of going to the backend and applying technical SEO practices directly in the code – with them you can simply go through the setup wizard and they’ll do the majority of heavy lifting.
SEO plugins also allow you to integrate your website with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and often premium versions offer advanced SEO features such as rank tracking, keyword tracking, etc.
Considering the amount of free online resources, setting up your new WordPress website with best SEO practices isn’t that difficult.
However, how optimized the code behind is can be pretty questionable.
Advanced SEO guidelines are focused on super technical parts such as the way the code was written, what should be on client-side rendering, what should be on server-side rendering, proper schema markup, and its manual manipulations, etc. In those advanced cases, you might end up with a headache if you’re not super familiar with WordPress’s background and how it works.
Webflow
Webflow advertises “building optimized code – visually” and after testing this we can verify that their code is truly properly optimized per the latest SEO guidelines.
Even though we’ll talk more about this in the Performance section, it’s important to mention that a healthy SEO game comes first from properly written and optimized code, which is something Webflow definitely paid attention to.
When it comes to other aspects of SEO in Webflow, the platform doesn’t have many add-ons, but it has a lot of built-in features, such as a basic audit tool for technical SEO, a dedicated 301 redirect section, an auto-generated sitemap feature, and the ability to edit on-page SEO elements.
For advanced campaigns, there are a couple of third-party solutions, such as Semflow, but Webflow also offers advanced SEO features, which it charges for additionally.
Altogether, both solutions allow users to step up their SEO game, but the approach is significantly different.
Third Party Integrations
Integrations play an essential role in the advanced features you want to have on your website, and Webflow and WordPress offer different solutions.
WordPress
As you already know, WordPress dominates the world of CMS platforms with its ability to install plugins for practically anything you can think of.
All plugins are developed by third-party developers and companies, and there are 59,447 free plugins in WordPress’s directory, which means you can find a solution for any advanced feature you want.
There are also plugins for even more advanced features such as automation which allow you to automate any step of your workflow in WordPress.
Webflow
Due to the differences in the CMS Model, Webflow doesn’t have that amount of freedom when it comes to third-party integrations.
They focus on developing the features in-house, but that doesn’t mean anything if you want to integrate third-party opt-in forms or payment gateways.
Webflow recognizes this problem which is why they have their own version of the plugins directory, but more importantly, they have an entire Integrations resource library where you can familiarize yourself with how to apply advanced features you want.
WordPress actiually made this process a lot more seamless, but it’s important to mention that WordPress is 10 years older than Webflow – it goes without saying that better solutions for third-party integrations will be presented by Webflow in the next 10 years.
E-commerce
E-commerce features change the entire purpose of the website, and it’s safe to say that this subject is so big that it deserves to be covered separately (which we’ll be doing soon!).
WordPress
In order to run an e-commerce shop on your WordPress website, you have to install an e-commerce plugin such as WooCommerce, the most popular solution by far, and set it up properly.
WooCommerce is quite a heavy plugin and there are even plugins that supplement it, such as MailChimp For WooCommerce, Multilingual & MultiCurrency for WooCommerce, etc.
This means that you’re adding more and more plugins, which can reflect seriously on your website’s performance.
Another issue is that you have to be familiar with how caching works, as improper caching can affect your customer journey – especially when it comes to the checkout stage.
In general, dedicated e-commerce platforms are considered better for building online shops, but the reason why users still choose a combination of WordPress and WooCommerce is because it’s free.
Scaling the shop on this model can be a real headache, but for this post, all that matters is that you can build an amazing shop that looks modern and you can run the entire operation on WordPress by using WooCommerce. You just need to be a bit more tech-savvy.
Webflow
Webflow e-commerce shops are seriously underrated on the market, as Webflow’s e-commerce pricing offers so many options that it comes super close even to the most popular solutions dedicated only to e-commerce.
Basically, if you want to run an online store on Webflow, all you have to do is to get one of their e-commerce plans and start designing your shop.
Again, this will require the knowledge of how their ecosystem works, but that’s something you’ll have to master either way if you plan on working with any type of Webflow website.
They also have a free plan, so you can test it out.
In this comparison, even though WordPress offers a free solution, it’s safe to say that Webflow wins the race – you don’t have to worry about plugin conflicts, overlapping design, and other stuff. All you have to do is simply select that you want to build an online shop and design it.
Hosting
Hosting doesn’t seem like a significant difference to mention but it’s still big enough to get you over the fence, as plenty of things still depend on your personal preference.
WordPress
As we already mentioned, WordPress is a self-hosted solution which means that you can pick your hosting provider and install WordPress there.
As WordPress is tremendously popular you have a lot of WordPress-managed hostings – solutions that are made specifically for WordPress websites – such as Kinsta, Servebolt, and WP Engine.
Prices usually start around $20-$30.
These companies usually have very good support teams that can help you set up your WordPress website (from the technical side of things of course), and take care of any hosting-related issue.
On the other side, you don’t have to pick managed WP hosting – you have other options such as shared hosting, but be aware that these hosting providers don’t usually provide excellent performance.
Webflow
Since Webflow is SaaS, hosting is included in all their plans, which means if you decide to build a website with Webflow, they got you covered.
We tested Webflow’s hosting on various occasions and the results were excellent. The performance was above average, and something you definitely won’t worry about if you pick the platform for building your next website.
Just like managed WP solutions, Webflow has an amazing, and highly responsive, support team that can help you with absolutely everything.
In reality, the only meaningful difference is that you can host WordPress anywhere, and for Webflow you don’t even have to think about it as it’s all done on their servers.
Some want to have more control over their hosting, while others don’t even want to know what the hosting is – in the end, it all depends on your needs and preferences. It’s important to mention that with Webflow, you can export your website and host it on other hosting platform.
Maintenance
You’ve built your website and you let it do its magic (get you more traffic, more leads, convert visitors to leads, spread brand awareness, and whatnot), and the only thing left is to stay consistent with publishing on your blog.
What are the differences in this case if you have a Webflow site and if you have a WordPress site?
WordPress
This is one of the biggest problems old WordPress websites have.
There are WordPress version updates, plugin updates, theme updates, and PHP version updates.
Once you build your website with WordPress, everything seems stable, but as longer periods of time pass by, things become fragile – various types of conflicts in code start occurring and you have no other option but to spend a good amount of money on experienced developers to debug and fix.
It’s true, that the leaner the site, the fewer problems it experiences, but over time things simply start breaking down.
In order to maintain your WordPress website properly, the ideal solution would be to minimize the number of plugins, disable automatic updates, and test every update in a sandbox to make sure it doesn’t break anything. Also, make sure to have backups before updates.
All this is pretty time-consuming, which is the reason why many are looking for alternatives.
Webflow
We’ll say it as simple as possible – there’s no maintenance for a Webflow site.
Exactly.
Besides your content and design, there’s literally nothing to update or work with that would be classified as maintenance.
Webflow takes care of your website’s technicalities in the backend, and you don’t even know about its version updates – it just lets you know if there’s a new feature available, and that’s it.
It goes without saying: Webflow takes this race easily.
Security
Another huge aspect of every website, and something that should definitely be a deciding factor when choosing between Webflow and WordPress.
WordPress
Considering the number of years of its development, it’s safe to say that WordPress is secure. Of course, it’s important to use secure hosting and keep your WordPress version up to date, but the general verdict would be that it’s safe.
There are third-party plugins, such as Wordfence, AIOS, and Jetpack to help improve security even further, and premium versions even allow you to have additional features such as IP blocking.
Also, it’s important to follow general WordPress security guidelines to prevent the possibility of your website ending up hacked.
Webflow
Just like with maintenance, there’s not much to worry about with the Webflow website, as Webflow ensures your website and data are well protected.
This is one of the benefits of using SaaS, as they’re basically responsible for your website’s security.
You can learn a lot more about Webflow’s security measures on their website.
Again, just like with maintenance, it’s fair to say that Webflow wins this race, as there’s less to worry about with its service.
Performance
A website’s performance plays a key role in so many situations – user experience, ranking, conversion rate, etc.
WordPress
The speed and performance of your WordPress website depends on multiple factors:
- Theme
- Amount of plugins
- Size of your page
- Hosting provider
- Caching system
…and much more.
Joggling all these factors can be tiring and pretty complex, and users often feel overwhelmed.
WordPress is just a piece of software – an application – so you’re the one responsible for all the code created along with design and feature development. This means that if you’re not familiar with the backend, you might create heavy and unoptimized code that’s simply difficult to load in a reasonable time. You should have this in mind when picking the theme and plugins.
Bad hosting providers can also affect your website’s speed so regardless of how light the page is, servers might take additional time to deliver the content to the user’s browser.
When it comes to caching, many managed hosting solutions have best practice guidelines, but again, you shouldn’t blindly follow the instructions, but dedicate time to learning how your website actually works.
This means that performance can significantly vary and in majority of cases, it’s bad – hence the existence of WordPress performance optimization agencies.
Webflow
Webflow advertises “building optimized code – visually” and after testing on various occasions and consulting with many top notch developers, all of them verified that the code is truly lightweight and perfectly optimized.
There are no miles-long CSS files, unnecessary add-ons, empty rows in databases, and render-blocking JavaScript.
Webflow takes care of a lot of performance-affecting things automatically, but you should still follow their guide on enhancing your Webflow website’s performance.
Overall, there are definitely far fewer performance issues with Webflow, than there are with WordPress, and handling performance issues is much easier with Webflow, which makes the logical conclusion – Webflow is a big majority of cases a better solution, especially for non-tech-savvy creators.
Ease of Use
A good portion of this article was dedicated to advanced features for advanced users but how does Webflow compare to WordPress when it comes to beginners who never had experience with any platform?
WordPress
If you decide to take managed WordPress hosting, then WordPress installation and use will be pretty beginner-friendly.
It won’t take long for you to figure out how things work in the dashboard and how to use drag-and-drop page builders.
Besides that, there’s almost a solution to any problem you might encounter and you can easily find it on YouTube.
Navigating through the dashboard is intuitive and the general structure of the website is simple to understand.
If you’re not familiar with HTML and CSS you might have a small learning curve to tackle, but nothing that will be super complex to the point where you consider quitting.
Webflow
Webflow isn’t really that intuitive for beginners, as the platform is built for designers.
Saying that, one should have a proper understanding of design principles but also HTML and CSS.
If you’re a beginner, you should sign up for their free plan and engage with their free university to learn how their software works, and how you can create things in their editor.
If you’re an advanced user and you have some design background, then you’ll have a much easier time figuring things out.
Regardless of your background, if you intend to work with websites built on Webflow, it’ll be essential that you invest time learning their ins and outs.
The final verdict in this case would be an obvious point for WordPress. Knowing that the biggest amount of people in the industry are beginners, it makes sense why their first pick is WordPress – it’s free and it’s easy to use.
Pricing
Pricing is definitely one of the biggest differences when it comes to the Webflow vs WordPress battle, but also the reason why so many people still choose WordPress.
WordPress
The WordPress application is free, but in order to build a website, you’ll need hosting – at least.
Shared hosting for low-traffic websites can go anywhere between $3-$10 per month, but bear in mind that shared hosting brings a lot of performance issues and it makes the website almost unscalable.
Still, if you decide to run a low-budget website, you can achieve that with WordPress.
On the other hand, if you plan to have a professional website or a website that excels 100,000 monthly visitors, you’ll need to invest a bit more:
- Dedicated hosting $30-$120/mo
- Premium Theme $50-$100/year
- Premium Plugins $50-$1000/year
- Maintenance costs $20-$100/hour
These costs heavily vary, depending on your needs.
Webflow
Webflow has two pricing models – Site Plans and Workspace plans.
To simplify:
Site plans are for users who simply want to build a single website and work with it.
There’s a free option, perfect for those who are mastering Webflow, and there are upgrades that you can choose, depending on your needs.
Workspace plans are for teams that want to build and stage multiple websites.
If you have an in-house team that requires multiple websites, then workspace plans look like this.
If you’re an agency or freelancer who wants to work with Webflow and build Webflow websites for others, then Workspace plans look like this:
In a nutshell, if you want to build a website on Webflow, you’ll go with Site plans options, but if you want to build multiple websites and maybe even develop a Webflow agency, then Workspace plans are the right solution for you.
Webflow also has separate e-commerce pricing.
You can find more details about Webflow pricing on their website.
If you’re wondering which of two is cheaper in the end, the answer is: it depends.
If you want to build a simple low-traffic website, WordPress might be a cheaper solution.
If you want to build and manage a high-traffic website, then Webflow offers a lot more stable pricing.
The third option goes for agencies and freelancers and in this case, you may end up paying less by building with WordPress, that’s if your clients are paying for their own hosting, as the majority of plugins and themes offer multiple websites integration in premium packages.
Take this with a grain of salt – there are too many factors that affect the pricing for bigger teams at a bigger scale, and you should always do your own math before making a decision.
Final Verdict: Which Is Better – WordPress or Webflow?
Well, it’s been quite a battle!
Let’s see our points chart:
So which one is actually better, WordPress or Webflow?
You guessed it – the answer is: it depends on your needs.
Yet, it wouldn’t make any sense if we were to leave it at that, so let’s cover a few scenarios where we can see in which cases Webflow works better than WordPress and the other way around.
Webflow vs WordPress For New Bloggers
If you’re a new blogger, with no technical experience but only a talent for writing, WordPress would be a better option for you.
The learning curve is much smaller, it’s cheaper, and in the end, you don’t even know if your new website is scalable.
Our suggestion for a setup would be to pick managed WordPress hosting, and some lightweight theme such as GeneratePress and focus on creating content and learning SEO.
Webflow vs WordPress For Established Bloggers and High-Traffic Sites
If you have a high-traffic site with over 100,000 monthly visitors, Webflow would probably work better for you.
Now this may be a hot take, as big majority of high-traffic websites, established bloggers, and niche site builders consider WordPress as the ultimate go-to CMS platform for these things.
However, the facts are clear:
- Webflow is a lot cheaper option in this case as there are no themes and plugins to play, and hosting doesn’t charge you per number of visits.
- Content management is a lot easier especially if you develop your own templates in Webflow.
- Much less time and effort around maintenance.
Think different? Let’s discuss it in the comments!
Webflow vs WordPress For Local Businesses
If you’re running a local business or building a website for someone who owns a local business, Webflow would be a much better option than WordPress.
The main reason for this is price and maintenance.
Owners of local businesses get a simple static website for $14/mo which is absolutely affordable and does the trick, and they pay it with one transaction, instead of paying for hosting on one bill, theme on second, and domain on third. Simply, it’s more convenient.
The same goes with maintenance – Webflow doesn’t want to bother with updates and that sort of stuff, so in this case, Webflow will do the perfect job for them. Once the site is created and no additional content is to be developed, it can be there for years without a single issue.
Webflow vs WordPress For Design Agencies
If you’re running a design agency or at least planning on launching one, Webflow would be a much better choice than WordPress.
Webflow was made for designers, and in the design space, it definitely represents the future, compared to WordPress.
Of course, as a design agency, your services will extend beyond creating websites for others, which means that you’ll need a team that’s a master of design tools such as Adobe Suite, Figma, etc. But when it comes to web design, Webflow is simply much more fertile ground for growing and scaling your business.
The main reason why Webflow is a better choice is because even if you don’t like designing in Webflow, migration from Adobe XD or Figma is seamless, and much easier and simpler than migrating design to WordPress.
In addition, in the case of Webflow, you don’t need experienced developers, which allows you to form a better pricing of your services.
You can visit Webflow’s agency plans to learn more about the packages they have for agencies.
Webflow vs WordPress For Marketing Agencies
If you’re running a marketing agency or you’re planning on launching one, WordPress would be a better choice than Webflow.
The majority of clients who need marketing and advertising services will probably have a website built in WordPress. Therefore, you need to adapt to them, so focusing on learning WordPress’s ins and outs makes the most sense.
Design might be one of your services, but unlike a design agency, it’s not your primary service, so in addition to your marketing services, you might turn off your clients by suggesting that they switch to a platform they probably never heard of – they want to see marketing results, not (re)design results, which is initially why they’re looking for a marketing agency, and not a design agency.
Webflow vs WordPress For E-commerce Businesses
If you’re running an e-commerce store or online shop business, Webflow would be a much better option than WordPress.
That’s if we’re talking about serious, professionally built, and scalable shops.
When it comes to shops it’s safe to say that many solutions out there are better choices for building e-commerce stores as WordPress in combination with WooCommerce is simply not the most practical solution. You need multiple additional plugins for payment gateways, email marketing, etc.
It may be a good solution for testing the idea you have as it’s basically free, but if it works, switching to any other platform including Webflow is a much better choice.
Webflow’s e-commerce solution is definitely among the leading solutions as it offers incredible flexibility, customization, and already integrated advanced features.
Webflow vs WordPress For SaaS Companies
If you’re running a SaaS company or you’re planning to launch one, a better CMS solution would definitely be Webflow.
Here, we won’t focus on the actual build of the software within these platforms, but on where the rest of the site (landing pages, blog, help & support documents, etc) should be managed.
More and more enterprise-size SaaS companies are switching to Webflow simply because it’s a lot easier to manage the content.
NCR, UpWork, DropBox… Those are just a few of the most popular SaaS companies out there, and they all recognized the potential in Webflow and decided to make the switch.
The reasons are something we already discussed – cheaper maintenance, easier content management, and more efficient and flexible design campaigns.
Conclusion
Webflow vs WordPress is a topic that will be ongoing in the years to come, especially since Webflow is getting more and more popular.
Which one is better is a pretty difficult question to answer, as both of them have their pros and cons, and the choice heavily depends on your needs and goals.
As of now, in the majority of cases, Webflow makes more sense, but that’s a subject of change as both platforms are evolving every day.
WordPress is still developing, and we’re certain that they also see a no-code future clearly, which means that eventually, they’ll reach the point where users will need to be minimally invested in the backend.
Still, Webflow’s future is clear as day – it’s on the path to becoming the world’s leading web design and development platform, and with continuous improvement of its features, it’ll get there pretty soon.
As a Webflow-focused agency, we worked with numerous clients helping them build an authoritative and modern online presence, but also helping them migrate from WordPress to Webflow.
If you’re on the fence about how Webflow would work for you and your business model, we’d love to help – contact us, and let’s figure things out together!
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