Webflow vs WordPress CMS Platform Comparison Review [2023]

1. Overview

2. There are 4 Main Differences

3. Features

3.1. SEO Features

Of course, there’s no point in having an amazing website that offers something valuable to potential clients, if that website can’t be found. SEO is a crucial part of your marketing as much as your advertising. Fortunately, both tools offer some powerful features for optimizing your content for search engines.

🔎 Webflow for SEO

Is Webflow good for SEO? This must be one of the first questions people ask when they start considering moving to Webflow from another platform. The good news is, yes, Webflow has all the essentials for website optimization.

Clean Code

This is not SEO feature, however, your website having a clean well- structured code allows search engines to easily scan and understand your content. Therefore, they will rank your indexed pages accordingly.

Optimization Controls

Webflow has in-built tools for native controls for adding custom permalinks, image alt text and description, and meta titles.

SEO Tools Integration

You can easily integrate Google Analytics, Search Console, and XML sitemap generation.

🖥️ Webflow CMS Tools

Edit Live Websites Directly

Webflow’s website editor allows you to easily manage and update your content from a live website without having to touch the back-end.

Visual Editor

One of the strongest sides of Webflow is its visual editor. This means you can design your content right on the page and see how it will look once you publish it. Unlike WordPress, where you stay in the dashboard and occasionally hit Preview to see your page in action, the Webflow editor shows you exactly what you’ll get while you’re building it.

Content Filters

In addition, you can also display content conditionally by adding filters. This means that only the particular content you need would be displayed.

Real-Time Collaboration

You can give access to team members and clients so they can add and edit content, and you can even collaborate with team members in real-time.

Zapier Integration

And last, let’s not forget you can integrate your web applications and automate your workflow with Zapier. This means you can integrate with over 750 apps without the need to use any code.

Once you create your website you can download the code and send it to your developer team.

🖥️ WordPress CMS Tools

Dashboard

Similar to Webflow, you don’t need any coding skills to build a website in WordPress unless you opt for a fully customized professional website with a specific brand identity. WordPress offers you an intuitive and straightforward dashboard to work with.

Two Editors

Currently, WordPress pushes the Gutenberg block editor to work like a page builder plugin and allows you to drag and drop items into a post or page. However, you also have the option to disable it and use the classic, much more popular editor.

Manage Unlimited Pages Directly from your Dashboard

You can add as many pages as you like, there are no limits to the size of your website.

Collaboration Tools

WordPress is also good for cooperation as you can add users and assign roles and permissions for each: admin, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber.

🏆 Winner: Draw

Both Webflow and WordPress are powerful CMS tools that give you full control over your website.

On one hand, Webflow is ideal for users who don’t want to bother with the code but still want all the customization options. On the other, WordPress changed its editor to Gutenberg to make it also more approachable to non-coders. Now let’s see what the two platforms have in stock.

🎨 Webflow Design Tools

Drag-and-Drop Builder

Webflow has a drag-and-drop interface that starts with a blank canvas. You simply drag and drop any element you like from sidebars and tabs to text, images, and videos and arrange them as you see fit.

CSS Properties

To start with, Webflow provides you with CSS properties to develop CSS grid layouts visually. This feature also includes eight CSS filters that can help you create effects on specific elements of your website.

Responsive Images and Templates

Webflow comes with responsive images and templates which makes building responsive websites for multiple devices a piece of cake. With this, the tool optimizes and scales your images automatically for different resolutions. This is even easier if you opt for a pre-made responsive template for your website rather than building it from scratch.

CSS3 Flexible Boxes

Using Webflow’s CSS3 flexible boxes allows you to develop responsive and flexible layouts, and define color swatches globally.

UI Animations

One of the coolest perks of Webflow is the ability to create interactive websites without crying over your JS code. The tool gives you access to 20 pre-built animations and transitions to choose from and apply to different sections or elements of your website with a click. You can also design your own UI animations. Again, with no need to code, you can build:

• Complex custom scroll animations
• Scroll-based parallax animations
• Progress bars
• Reveal on click and hover animations

Full Typography Control

You can use any font you like and customize it further by changing the tracking and line-height.

🎨 WordPress Design Tools

Since the entire gimmick of WordPress is to work on extensions, you can easily design your website by installing a theme. Once you do that, you can customize it by changing colors, sizes, fonts, and images. If your theme lacks something essential to your design, simply install a plugin for it.

When it comes to creating a completely customized website, however, your best option is to do it from scratch. With this being said, you have to either develop it yourself or hire a developer to do it for you. Of course, this option is best suitable for big businesses, as it might be overkill for smaller startups and local businesses.

Gutenberg

What is Gutenberg? Also known as the new block-based editor, first introduced in WordPress 5, Gutenberg is a radical change from the classic editor. The new approach offers blocks as content elements that you can add to the screen and create content layouts. In short, each item you add is a block.

The editor offers a huge set of blocks you can use, such as paragraphs, images, video, galleries, embeds, audio, columns, lists, spacing, etc.

🏆 Winner: Webflow

Although you can easily add any type of customization in WordPress by installing plugins, Webflow has all the design tools you need already built-in and ready to use, which also keeps the code clean.

➕ Webflow Extensions and Integrations

Themes

Webflow offers over 45 free and 500 premium customizable themes for you to work with.

Code Snippets

You can’t add plugins that work directly in Webflow. However, there are workarounds. You can still extend your website’s functionality by integrating code snippets from your favorite services.

Integrations

Webflow doesn’t offer many native integrations. Similar to the extension, you will need to rely on code embeds most of the time. This means copying the embed code from the original service and adding it to Webflow.

➕ WordPress Extensions and Integrations

Themes

WordPress offers more than 4.2K free and 10K premium themes, which makes the platform an absolute winner in terms of template choices.

Plugins

By the time you read this review, there are more than 59K official WordPress plugins available for free, as well as thousands of premium ones. You can expand your capabilities to manage your websites or add more functionalities. There are popular WordPress plugins for SEO, security, eCommerce, forms, social media integration, and anything you can think of.  Just keep in mind not to exceed 20 plugins per site. Too many plugins mean too many HTTP requests, which translates into higher loading times.

🏆 Winner: WordPress

When it comes to themes and plugins, there’s no contest. WordPress offers over 14K official themes and over 60K official plugins for any type of customization and functionality. In contrast, Webflow has over 500 templates and no option to add plugins.

You can integrate some services into Webflow with code embeds, however, WordPress offers actual integrations and works with all popular third-party services and tools that you may need to grow your business.

🛒 Webflow for eCommerce

All eCommerce features are built-in once you subscribe to an eCommerce plan.

You can customize everything from the product page to the final checkout page and even the automated transactional emails. This is very important, especially considering a lot of website builders out there don’t give you control over the design of your checkout page. Here, you don’t need to agree to generic stuff, as you can customize every single element and get the contingency 100% on brand.

Webflow integrates all popular payment methods: PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Stripe. You can also define shipping rules and regions.

🛒 WordPress for eCommerce

You can add eCommerce functionality to your website by using a plugin. The most popular, tested, and proven one is, of course, WooCommerce. It works as a third-party integration within WordPress and enables you to use all your already existing plugins and the WP command-line interface. It’s completely free. However, there are additional costs that will inevitably surface if you decide to include extra features on your website.

In case you start from scratch without an existing WordPress website, there are a few things you’ll need to do prior to setting up your store:

• Acquire hosting services
• Install and configure WordPress CMS
• Build the design of your pages and add the features you need.
• Install and configure WooCommerce.

🏆 Winner: Draw

All eCommerce features you need are built-in once you subscribe to an eCommerce plan. On the other hand, WordPress offers WooCommerce, which is a powerful eCommerce extension that comes completely for free, however, it lacks some of the essential eCommerce tools you might need. In order to add them, you’ll need to install more plugins.

📓 Getting Started with Webflow

You register an account, sign up and complete the short survey that aims to customize your experience according to your needs. Once you’re done, Webflow will launch a tutorial that will teach you the basics of the tool and its key concepts. That’s it.

You can either start building your website from scratch by choosing Blank site or pick a pre-made template that best suit your needs and go from there. Webflow will give you full control over each element of your website.

It has a very user-friendly interface and doesn’t require HTML/CSS knowledge. However, it’s important to mention that Webflow is mostly suitable for landing pages and smaller projects. But for more complex projects, a lot can go wrong because we don’t have much experience with the system.

On the other hand, Webflow also has a very well-developed learning center, where you can get the basics.

📓 Getting Started with WordPress

In order to get started with WordPress, first, you’ll need web hosting to install the WordPress software. Most hosting services offer tools for installing and configuring WordPress in a few clicks. The next thing you need is to choose a theme to start with. Don’t worry. You can change it anytime in the future without losing content. To make things easier, simply install a drag-and-drop visual editor plugin.

WordPress is very versatile and suitable for users from any technical background. Beginners with zero experience with code can easily build a website by themselves, while advanced users can access the website’s front- and back-end.

🏆 Winner: Draw

Both Webflow and WordPress are intuitive and easy to use, with a small learning curve.

🏷️ Webflow Pricing

Especially when we compare Webflow to open-source tools, it can get pricy. Depending on whether you want to build a content-driven website or one for your eCommerce business, there are two pricing categories. There’s also a third category for teams.

Site Plans

• Starter $0: Webflow.io domain, 50 CMS items, 1GB bandwidth
• Basic $12/mo billed annually: Custom domain, 0 CMS items, 50 GB bandwidth
• CMS $16/mo billed annually: Custom domain, 2K CMS items, 200 GB bandwidth; 3 guest editors
• Business $36/mo billed annually: Custom domain, 10K CMS items, 400 GB bandwidth; 10 guest editors
• Enterprise (Custom Plan): Custom domain, 10K CMS items, custom bandwidth; custom guest editors; Uptime SLAs

eCommerce Plans

• Standard $29:  500 items; 2% transactional fee; $50K annual sales volume; all CMS plan features
• Plus $74:  1K items; 0% transactional fee; $200K annual sales volume; all Business plan features
• Advanced $212:  3K items; 0% transactional fee; unlimited annual sales volume; all Business plan features

Workplace Plans

• Starter $0:  1 seat; 2 unhosted sites
• Core $19:  Up to 3 seats; 10 unhosted sites; billing permissions; custom code; code export
• Growth $49:  Up to 9 seats; unlimited unhosted sites; publishing permissions; custom code; code export
• Enterprise (Custom Plan): Custom seat limits; unlimited unhosted sites; publishing permissions; custom code; code export; advanced security, performance, and customer success.

In addition, Webflow is available for a free trial or a limited free plan where you can test the software for 2 projects.

🏷️ WordPress Pricing

WordPress is a very affordable option since it’s completely free and all you have to do is pay for hosting.

Other expenses that may occur are if you wish to purchase a premium theme or premium plugins for specific functionalities. The good news is, that you will still be able to have a fully functional website or web store just on free features and free extensions.

🏆 Winner: WordPress

WordPress is a free open-source platform that allows you to build a fully functioning website only based on free extensions. Considering, that there are pretty cheap hosting services, powering your website on WordPress is definitely the more affordable option.

To sum up, let’s have a final comparison based on the pros and cons we already discussed during this review.

Your choice should comply solely with your preference, web design requirements, and proficiency. Webflow has a lot of potential as a powerful platform with an array of custom development setups and a worthy integrated eCommerce engine.

Still can’t decide?

Already have a project in mind but can’t decide which platform is the best fit?

We’d love to start a conversation with you and discuss your vision. Let’s see if we’ll be a good match.

Conclusion

Both Webflow and WordPress are powerful tools you can use to build your website with no coding experience. It all comes down to philosophy: do you prefer a tool that has all the essentials built in, or do you prefer a clean slate to add any kind of customization and functionality in the form of extensions?

We hope this detailed Webflow vs WordPress review helped you choose the option that is right for you.

In the meantime, you may also be interested in some of these related articles:

• What is Lean UX and Why You Should Consider it for Your Business?
• 10 Golden UI Design Principles and How To Use Them
• Responsive vs Adaptive Design – Which is better?