Why we left Webflow after 30+ client projects

We spent two years and more than thirty projects building websites on Webflow. Direct client work, and partner work for branding and marketing studios abroad who had no developers of their own. Everything from early startups to a music label.

This is not a hit piece. Webflow is a capable product, we shipped real work on it, and some of it still looks great. But the reasons to leave never arrived all at once. They accumulated, one project at a time, until we were spending more energy on what the platform allowed than on what the client actually needed.

Today we don't run a single site on it. Here's the honest version of why, written for the people who pay for websites rather than the people who build them. If you're choosing between platforms rather than leaving one, we compared the five main options separately.

• 30+

  client projects shipped on Webflow, from startups to a music label

• 2 years

  on the platform, as a studio and as a partner to other studios

• 0

  sites we run on it today

The five walls we kept hitting

1. Anything interesting lived outside the platform

Every good project reaches a moment where the design needs something real: a scroll animation that feels designed rather than templated, an interactive calculator, a custom form flow. On Webflow that meant custom code. Custom code meant hosting the file somewhere else and wiring it back in.

Which meant you couldn't see it in the Designer preview. To check whether a change worked, we published to a staging site. Every single time. The site the client saw while editing was never quite the site their visitors would get.

2. Your video, on someone else's account

Webflow still doesn't host video. That isn't an oversight we discovered: the feature request has been open since 2017, and Webflow's own documentation tells you to host video somewhere else. Images cap at 4 MB.

So we hosted client video on Bunny. Which turned a simple task into homework: to swap a video, the client had to open a second platform, upload the file, copy a URL, come back to the CMS, and paste it into the right field. Nobody enjoys that, and most people quietly stop doing it.

The asset manager around it was just as thin. No tags. No renaming. No bulk actions. No AI assistance. Nothing you'd expect from a media library, and no video, on a platform whose whole promise is that marketers can run their own site.

3. An article could only be text

Rich text on Webflow gives you paragraphs, headings, lists, links and images. That is the whole list. You cannot place a component inside an article: no call to action, no comparison table, no stats row, no chart, not even a gallery.

Any client running serious content marketing hits this within a month. Our answer was always a version of the same sentence: we can't do that, but here's a workaround.

What your team can put inside an article

The first three images are what Webflow allows inside an article. The last three are what our clients work with.

Webflow: the rich text field where a client writes an article.

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4. Every language costs extra, and we became the translators

Localization is billed per language, per month, and if you want localized URLs, which you do, that sits in the higher tier at $29 per locale per month. On a three-language site that's a permanent line item on top of the plan.

The part that stung more: clients couldn't use it. Switching between locales, tracking what was already translated, working through the editing surface, none of it was intuitive enough. So translation requests came to us. Teams were paying per language for a feature their own people couldn't operate.

5. The wall that decided it: clients wouldn't touch the site

Webflow is sold as the platform where marketers build. In our experience, marketers called us instead.

One client had full video documentation that we recorded for them. They still called. Not because the build was sloppy: the site was properly componentized and the setup was as clean as the platform allowed. They were simply afraid of breaking the layout. Adding a section, duplicating one, rewriting the copy inside it, all of it came through us. Some of the features we built for them are still unused today, because learning them felt harder than asking.

The editing surface didn't help. A client would open a page and be looking at a style panel full of classes and elements: a designer's instrument, handed to someone who wanted to change a headline.

We were selling workarounds

Read that list again and the pattern is hard to miss. A third-party toolkit for CMS features the CMS should have had. External hosting for code. External hosting for video. Us, personally, for translations. A workaround for every ordinary expectation.

Eventually we noticed that every project started with the same question: will the platform let us do this? That's the wrong first question. The right one is what does this client need, and the platform should be the last thing standing in the way.

And the ground kept moving

There's a second reason, and it has nothing to do with features we wanted. Webflow retired Logic, its native automation feature, in June 2025. User accounts and memberships were sunset in January 2026. And in August 2026 the classic Editor, the simple, walled-off surface agencies handed clients for a decade, was switched off entirely, taking agency white-labelling with it. Client seats are now capped at one on Freelancer and three on Agency, and cannot be purchased.

Three features that agencies actively recommended to clients, retired inside fourteen months. When your business runs on someone else's platform, you don't control the roadmap, and neither does the studio you hired.

What we build instead

Every wall above has a solution, and none of them are exotic. Content lives as structured content in Sanity, so an article isn't one blob of text but blocks your team assembles, including blocks we build specifically for you. Interactive work is part of the site rather than a script pasted in from elsewhere, and it shows up in preview like everything else. Video lives in the same system as the rest of your content.

And because it's real software rather than a closed platform, we can build tools that live inside your dashboard, made for your team's actual job. The whole approach has a name: a content operating system.

That last one surprises people. A typical project pays for hosting and the content platform and still comes in under the monthly price of Webflow's entry plan. No fee per language, no bandwidth overage that upgrades your plan for you, no add-on for the CMS you needed from day one.

"But doesn't a custom build lock me into you?"

Fair question, and the answer matters more than the pitch. The code is yours, in your repository. Your content is structured data on a standard platform with open APIs, exportable whenever you want. Any competent developer can pick it up. If you stop working with us, you keep all of it and hire someone else.

Compare that with the platform we left. Webflow's own documentation states that exporting your site excludes your CMS content, your forms, your localized content and your code components, and their pricing page confirms exported code cannot be imported back. The lock-in was never on our side of this comparison.

If any of this sounds like your week

We're not anti-Webflow. We're done explaining to clients why the basics need a workaround.

If your site is on Webflow and your team still calls someone to duplicate a section or swap a video, that isn't your team failing to learn the tool. It's the tool deciding what your team is allowed to do. You can pick a system that decides differently.

Thinking about moving off Webflow?

We migrate from Webflow, WordPress, and whatever else you're on. Tell us what your team struggles with today and we'll give you an honest read on whether a move is worth it.

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