Deciding on a website builder can be a difficult task, especially with so many options available today. As both Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) and Webflow are growing in the web design community, we know that figuring out the difference between both and choosing the right platform can take time! Don’t worry, we got you.
Both Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) and Webflow offer intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that make it easy to create a custom website without any coding knowledge. In this article, we'll compare Webflow and Editor X based on their design capabilities, customization options, eCommerce features, and SEO tools to help you decide which platform is the right fit for your next website project.
At Slam Media Lab (Slam), we’ve build websites on Webflow, Wix Studio, Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress for decades combined so we know what it takes to design and launch a website that works for you, your team, and it’s fully optimized for SEO. Read on!
Quick History of Webflow & Editor X
Webflow and Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) were started in the era of mobile growth and the low-code movement. They both set to put designers and marketers as their core audience as opposed to WordPress, which was created in the early 2000s and developers could easily make websites with their open-source web product.
Webflow and Wix Studio started with the goal of simplifying the process of making a website faster, while still being powerful. Here’s quick history of each of them.
What’s Webflow?
Webflow is a visual website design and development platform that allows users to create responsive websites without writing code. It was founded in 2013 by Vlad Magdalin, Sergie Magdalin, and Bryant Chou, with the goal of making web design and development more accessible. The founders previously worked at large tech companies like Intuit and Adobe and experience first-hand the problems of maintaining and updating a website.
Today, companies and businesses still need to hire a developer to make updates to their CMS and website design, especially those building on WordPress. This is why Webflow was built. Webflow works by providing a visual interface that allows users to design and develop websites using drag-and-drop tools, while also providing a powerful CMS that allows users to manage and update their website's content without the need for additional software.
You can choose from a wide range of templates or design their own custom layouts from scratch, and use Webflow's visual editor to add and edit content, style elements, and manage site structure.
Webflow's core tech stack is built on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which means that it produces clean, efficient code that is optimized for SEO and mobile. This makes it an ideal platform for founders and professional web designers and developers and marketers who want to create high-quality, responsive websites that rank well on Google from day one.
Since its inception, Webflow has gained a loyal following among designers, developers, marketers, and small business owners who want to create professional-looking websites without needing to learn how to code and without breaking the bank.
Slam is a certified Webflow professional partner! If you’d like to collaborate, contact us now.
What’s Editor X?
Wix Studio (formerly Editor X)is one of the latest web design and development platform. It was launched in 2020 by Wix, also an old school company from the early days of web 2.0. Founded by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan.
Wix Studio (formerly Editor X)is designed for professional web designers and agencies who need more advanced website design and development features than what is available on Wix's standard website builder, which, let's be honest, isn't great. Wix has been behind for years so the launch of Wix Studio is its chance to catch up with the market.
Wix Studio’s adoption has been growing in the last couple of years. Why? Because it provides a flexible, grid-based layout system that allows users to design custom website layouts from scratch, or to modify existing templates.
The platform also has CSS grid support, flexbox controls, and responsive breakpoints that enable users to create responsive websites that look great on all devices.
One of the key features of Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) is its integration with Wix's Velo platform, which allows Wix Studio users to add custom code and build custom integrations with third-party services. This gives web developers more control over the website's functionality and allows them to build more complex web applications like eCommerce, online booking systems, and custom web apps.
Editor X vs Webflow: Comparison Breakdown
While both Webflow and Editor X have grown in popularity in the last couple of years, Webflow is a much larger and developed platform compared to Editor X.
Let’s dive deep into the differences between Webflow and Editor X. We’ll go over the following capabilities:
- Design & customization
- Content management system (CMS)
- ECommerce capabilities
Webflow vs Editor X: Design & Customization
Both Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) and Webflow offer a range of customization options including:
- Drag-and-drop design interfaces
- Responsive design controls
- Ability to add custom code
- Integration with third parties (i.e. CRMs, ESPs)
- Flexible grid systems
- Intuitive user experience
- Team collaboration features (user roles & permissions)
The key differences between Wix Studioand Webflow on design and customization lay on the fact that most Editor X websites are static and don’t allow for cool animations and interactions.
Take our partners at Peer Health Exchange (PHE), a national nonprofit building communities for young people and helping them make healthy decisions. As an award-winning nonprofit marketing agency, we helped them rethink the way they reached Gen Z through their website.
The core design focused on PHE’s youth-first approach. To bring the Y2K vibes, we used animations to show and tell their stories through animated faces and interactive sections.
This would be hard to do on Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) vs Webflow, especially at scale and with the level of traffic and complexity that the PHE site has.
Because Editor X is still in beta and still launching features that Webflow has launched years ago, the clear winner in this section is Webflow.
It’s worth noting that if you want a simpler landing page, both Webflow and Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) have enough customization and design capabilities to make your vision come true.
But when designing and customizing a website with multiple pages, you want a strong community and a large library of resources to help you answer these questions. Webflow has a university hub, a Slack channel for webflowers, and a lot of documentation, from how to make animations to how to design a website that converts.
Trust us. You definitely don’t want to spend extra resources and time figuring out how to re-work your site!
At Slam, we’ve benefitted from Webflow’s customization features, allowing us to:
- Create websites for all of our nonprofit, SMB, and startup clients that look great on all devices and browsers
- Design animations that make each project more alive and dynamic
- Incorporate third parties like Memberstack that allows for users to create user profiles
- Help our partners translate their content to serve their multi-language audience
Looking to re-do your website? We’re offering a few 30-minute free website audits. Book time below!
Editor X vs Webflow: CMS
We previously did a deep dive of all major CMS platforms including WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, Wix Studio (formerly Editor X), Drupal, and Hubspot. Read our 2024 Web Design CMS comparison here. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here’s the quick TLDR.
Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) allows you to:
- Collaborate with designers, marketers, and devs on a single project. Multiple people can be on the same project at the same time
- Re-use the same custom designs and componentes. Say you built a section on the Homepage and you want to copy it to your Contact page. Easy peasy.
- Scale to many pages that are similar.
Plus, Wix Studiohas CMS templates you can easily use, which can speed up the process. But…there are still some limitations when it comes to updating content for SEO purposes. It’s difficult to change or add titles, alt text, descriptions within the CMS. We’ll dive more about this in the SEO section. Lastly, because the platform is still in beta, they have limited third-party integrations so you might need to custom code a lot of stuff still.
Webflow’s CMS on the other hand has a built-in CMS that allows you to make changes to your site visually. Say you want to update the title of a page, you can do that on both the Designer mode and the Editor mode.
The Designer mode is for making changes to your design. With the Editor mode, you can access all your data, change the copy, replace images, and add new pages. Webflow’s Editor mode is straight up fire. You can make changes on the front end, and edit the content directly as you see it.
What we’ve found helpful at Slam is that you can see if the text is too short or long for a specific section without having to see it on Figma or Adobe. Take a look for yourself:
Another plus for Webflow is its advanced hosting and security features. It has automatic backups for your content and site, SSL certificates, and DDoS protection.
The flipside of Webflow is yes, you still need to learn how to use the Editor mode. This should be quick though. As you see in the tutorial video, it takes less than a minute to learn the platform. And while Webflow has a strong support system (i.e. help center and a community forum), their documentation is not as through as WordPress, which makes sense given how large WordPress is.
At Slam, we provide documentation for all of our Webflow and Editor X’s projects so you don’t have to figure out how to make changes to a site you own. Reach out if you’d like to partner with us!
Webflow vs. Editor X: ECommerce Capabilities
When it comes to building an online store, you need a website builder that can handle the demands of your users.
Let's start with Editor X. One of the biggest advantages of using Wix Studio for eCommerce is its integration with Wix Stores. This means you can easily set up your online store, manage your inventory, and process payments all within the same platform. Plus, Editor X offers a variety of templates and design tools to help you create a professional-looking online store.
Here’s a full list of Wix Studio’s eCommerce capabilities:
- Launch a robust online store with checkout, shipping rates, and multiple payment options.
- You can translate the site into over 180 languages.
- Create restaurant websites with sophisticated features such as online reservations and orders.
- Create and display multiple events on a site. You can sell tickets, collect RSVPs, and send invitations
- Establish bookings with an online scheduling system
- Sell subscriptions, memberships, and packages
- Add live chat
- Set up message automations and manage your clients’ workflow
- Add multiple members
- Create and send quotes and invoices
Now, let's chat about Webflow’s e-commerce capabilities. One of the standout features of Webflow's eCommerce capabilities is its ability to customize every aspect of your online store, from the product pages to the checkout process.
Here’s a quick breakdown of Webflow’s e-commerce features:
- Customize your product information with specific features, images, and other details using customizable product fields.
- Control over the layout of your homepage and gallery pages without needing how to code. With this level of customization, you can create an impressive and memorable first impression on your website visitors.
- Make your transactional emails stand out by customizing them to reflect your brand. Upload your own logo and adjust colors to ensure that your receipt and order notification emails align with your brand's aesthetic.
- Add custom interactions and animations.
- Customize your delivery options to suit your products. You can provide various methods such as shipping, takeout, or email delivery.
- Accept payments from 200+ countries via credit card.
- Integrate with platforms like Printful (dropship products), Shippo (manage fulfillment), Quickbooks (order details), and Mailchimp (customer emails).
- Build a blog and landing pages
While both Editor X and Webflow offer impressive eCommerce capabilities, Webflow stands out for its customizable features that allow you to create a truly unique online store without any code!
Editor X vs. Webflow: SEO Capabilities
Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) and Webflow both offer robust SEO capabilities, allowing users to optimize their website for search engines and getting more traffic.
Here's a comparison of the SEO capabilities of both platforms:
Metas
Both platforms allow you to customize your meta titles and descriptions, which are important factors in how your website appears in SERPs. However, Webflow offers more flexibility when it comes to creating custom meta tags for individual pages (i.e. products or blogs).
In Webflow, you can create custom meta tags for open graph, Twitter, and other social media platforms, which can help improve the appearance of your website when it's shared on social. And it also allows you to add custom schema markup to your website, which is a type of structured data that helps search engines better understand the content on your website
With Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) you can’t really customize metas for individual pages or content types. Plus, it doesn't offer built-in support for custom schema markup.
Integrations
Both Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) and Webflow offer integrations with third-party SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Facebook Pixel. However, Webflow also offers integrations with more advanced SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
If you’re not very familiar with SEO terms, download our guide for free to get the breakdown!
Page Speed
Page speed is an important factor in SEO, as search engines prioritize websites that load quickly.
Both platforms offer tools to help you optimize your website's page speed, but Webflow's built-in optimization features tend to be more effective and easier to use.
Programmatic Pages
Programmatic pages are dynamic pages that can be created based on a specific set of criteria, such as a category or tag. Both platforms offer programmatic pages, but Webflow's dynamic page functionality is more robust. These features to reduce load time include:
- Automatic image optimization: Webflow automatically optimizes images when you upload them, which can help reduce their file size and improve page loading times.
- Lazy loading: Webflow uses lazy loading, which means that images and other media are only loaded when they come into view on the screen.
- Code minification: Webflow automatically minifies your website's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code
- Content delivery network (CDN): Webflow uses a global CDN to deliver your website's content from a server that's geographically closer to your website's visitors.
With Editor X, you have to do a lot more work! While it does offer some basic optimization tools, such as the ability to compress images and minify code, it doesn't have the same level of automation and optimization as Webflow.
Redirects
Redirects are important for SEO because they help maintain link equity when you change URLs or move content. Both Editor X and Webflow offer tools for creating redirects, but Webflow's system allows for more tracking and easy set-up.
In Webflow, you can add redirects to individual pages, folders, or specific URLs using the site settings panel. Webflow also provides detailed analytics and tracking for your redirects, so you can see how many people are using them and how often. This can help you identify any issues with your website's structure or content fast!
In contrast, Editor X's redirect system doesn't have the same level of automation and tracking as Webflow, and you may need to manually set up redirects for individual pages or sections of your website.
In this Webflow vs. Editor X SEO section, Webflow is the big winner by far.
Webflow vs. Editor X: Pricing
Moving on to pricing, both Editor X and Webflow offer a variety of pricing plans to fit different budgets and needs. Editor X's plans range from $17 to $165 per month, while Webflow's plans range from free to $14 starting plan to $212 per month.
One key difference between the two platforms is that Webflow offers a free plan, which includes limited features but can be a good option for users who are just starting out or who have a smaller budget. Editor X offers a 14-day free trial so you can test it out before buying it.
One thing to note for both Webflow and Editor X is that they offer plans for website plans, and a separate price for business and eCommerces.
Both platforms also offer enterprise-level plans for larger businesses, with custom pricing and additional features such as dedicated support and advanced analytics. In general, the pricing is pretty much the same so really it’s up to what you need and what you can afford.
Deciding Between Webflow & Editor X
Now, don't get me wrong. Editor X is a great website builder for beginners and those looking for a simpler solution. But if you want to take your website to the next level and really stand out, Webflow is the way to go! Plus, who doesn't want to build an SEO-optimized site from day one and have a little fun while building their website? With Webflow's advanced features like animations and interactions, you can do so!
Check out more of our Webflow-based redesigns and rebuilds at GovernmentProcurement.com, Kai XR, and Sage Step Consulting!
Want to build a website on Webflow? We got you! Reach out to us ASAP. We’re booked 1-3 months in advance.
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