Webflow? AI?
Completely
analog?

What to choose in this chaotic world?
Should developers and designers continue on Webflow?‍
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This post is a mix of my experience, and what I read in Linkedin, heard on Youtube and learn with Flux Academy about the experience of many founders and freelancers that decided to move from webflow to an AI workflow, or decided to stay "loyal" and continue with webflow (?).

Webflow benefits
‍Going straight to the point. Right now, Webflow has this benefits:
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- If you are doing an website and a marketing team need to update the website, you can control easily who has what level of access, and with a good strucutre of CMS, components and page slots, the marketing team can edit and create pretty much anything without breaking the design.
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- It has a beautiful visual editor to create any element in a page, and even a GSAP panel animation (to be honest, I prefer to code). And you can integrate Slater, Sandbox or Odin to manage all the code and make changes in realtime. Of course, it is important to understand the basics, and how GSAP and other techincal things work.

- So it is the only platform on the market that offer a beautiful visual editor, and a powerful CMS system that can be managed using components, props, and page slots by non technical people, with the security issues being managed under the hood.



We cannot control how AI will evolve.
But we can control our taste and our authentic self.
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The other side of the coin
‍On the other hand, with the updated prices, Webflow became expensive for the Basic plan, and even more for the old CMS plan, now the "Premium". And if you want to add add-ons, and a workspace it can become expensive really quick.

On top of this, there is the bandwidth problem. If a personal project takes off, I don't want to pay to maintain the website active. I prefer to host somewhere, free.

Yes, you have full control on what you developed, you have SEO suggestions inside Webflow to increase the visibility and you have all this features under the hood for security issues.

And you can control every parameter, padding, margin, width, aspect ratio, background-color, the name of the classes to use in code, create variables, components.... This all looks amazing and very exciting, for those who are developing (until now - if I have the choice to create something in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours, and use this time to create other things...the answer is straightforward right)

And the majority of the clients want to pay less, and the results fast, so they don't care if the website is done on Webflow, Framer, with AI,, or even Wordpress (please don't :D).
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From Webflow to AI
‍I read somewhere that Webflow is like a generalist, is very good at many things, but now with AI something changed. It is possible to gather all the best tools in each category, and merge them, easily with Claude.
- Vercel for hosting.
- Sanity for CMS
- Github for controlling the versions
- PostHog for A/B testing
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And the best part? Everything has a free plan that is more than enough for the majority of the projects.

Before AI, the old process looked like this:
Strategy → Figma → Webflow development → launch

Now it can look like this:
Strategy → AI-generated design → AI-generated code → human refinement → launch

Less time on the technical parts, more time to create, to plan, and to strategize.
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The question. What to choose?
‍Now, in the beginning of each project, beyond the project brief questions about the brand and the visuals of the website, one question is even more important:
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-  The company / agency / studio / client needs a powerful marketing website that a team can manage and scale without breaking anything? The answer is probably Webflow (mainly because of the security measures that take place under the hood, because nowadays with Ship Studio and Sanity for CMS it is possible to build and manage a marketing website)
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- If not, most likely AI. Faster, cheaper (0€ hosting). Better (?) - well, this depends on whoever is writing the prompts, their individual taste, and how good is the design.

- If the client need custom logic or some random integration? Definitely AI. If I can spend 5 minutes creating a complex section instead of 1 hour, well the answer is straight forward.

- For a landing page? Definitely AI.

A side note here, for a more complex and high end company, who needs a robust design, average is not enough, and AI is average. AI will leverage all the average designs, and cannot create something out of the box.  For a unique creation, we always need a custom strategy and a great designer.

In the end of the day, we need to ask something:
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- What makes sense to add to our current workflow and our client needs?

We can prepare and guardrail a Webflow website as good as an AI website, for the client to not break the design while editing. Also, the client care about flexibility, speed, and feeling in control, and that's up to us (developers) to give them, because no tool does this out of the box.

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Want to accelerate things even faster with AI?

If you want to accelerate things even faster with AI, I highly recommend  Ship studio.
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It is a free, open-source desktop app built by Julian Galluzzo, who spent years building Webflow before this.
He pulled development into one window: an AI agent, live preview, visual editing, Git, and one-click deploys.
You bring your own agent, Claude Code in my case > connect GitHub and Vercel > and build a fully custom website/app.

Don't need to "npm run install" on the terminal, or to change context between terminal, vercel, github and claude. Faster and smoother, everything in one window.

I created this website in 5 days, learning from scratch how to setup everything, took the provided figma design and build with AI, create a CMS component library to create new pages on-brand (prepared for the client to manage) added GSAP animations and page transitions... something that would take me days in Webflow. Here? A few hours.
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Can now beginners create awwward winning websites?

I heard that beginners now can create stunning websites. I don't agree.
- The design foundations (know how to combine great typography, imagery, spacing and color psychology).
- SEO and motion knowledge. The problem-solving mindset a developer has gain during years of coding.
- The experience and unique taste to understand what works and what can become a problem in the future.
- The technical jargon to prompt specific words to achieve a greater result and not an amatheurish one.

All of this is essential to create something memorable. Because it is very easy to identify a website that was done with AI, mainly if it was created by a beginner or someone outside the design / dev area.
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Times have changed

I remember navigating on StackOverflow, searching for a magic solution to a problem I've been trying to solve for the past 5 hours. Because the thought process was "if I have this problem, someone in the world already solved it".

Nowadays there is no thought process if we're not careful!
We ask Claude, and we get the answer, in seconds. OMG

So, it is extremely important to discern, to judge the answer, and not use right away.
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That's why a basic understanding of whatever someone is developing is essential, to judge the AI answer, and never let their suggestions overcome your unique intuition and taste.

At the same time, we don't need to understand everything about the techincal parts of the web before creating a website / app. Now, we can learn along the way, starting by knowing how the basic things work.
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In the end of the day

Choosing Webflow, Framer or AI is not so important. Because it is just a tool.
And we can't control how a tool will evolve in a few months, even in a few days.
But we can control our taste, our knowledge, our experience, our intuition, our authenticity!

And if someone feels to go away this digital world and go completely analog, buy a land and grow their own vegetables and doing yoga every morning I don't judge him.

I don't know where things go, and really nobody knows. We just need to step up our game, staying up to date with the latest AI news, and focus on our expertise, our taste and our great foundations.
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And I think the more AI evolve, the greater will be the human urge to connect with the earth and things unrelated with the digital world. Real life stuff that will lighten our path and our happiness.

So we all walk on this path of uncertainty and we have no other choice but to keep walking.



* This post was originally written on Linkedin, I improved and developed some parts for this blog post