Welcome to Slam Media Lab's in-depth review between two of the most popular website building platforms in the market - Webflow and Wix. As a leading agency in web design and development, we have extensive experience with both platforms and have tried every single feature from both web development platforms. In this guide, we will review Webflow vs Wix and help you decide which is the most suitable platform for your needs.
We will analyze the features, pricing, and use cases of Webflow and Wix, giving you a comprehensive overview of each platform's strengths and weaknesses. Whether you're a startup looking to launch your new marketing website or a business owner ready to bring your ideas to life, this comparison will help you make an informed decision! Here’s how we’ll break it down:
- Is Webflow like Wix?
- Wix vs Webflow: Designers and Developers
- Wix vs Webflow: CMS
- Compare Wix and Webflow for SEO
- Webflow and Wix Pricing
- Slam’s take on Webflow vs Wix
Is Webflow like Wix?
Sort of. For context, Webflow was started in 2013 by Vlad Magdalin, Sergie Magdalin, and Bryant Chou. All three had a design, product management, and marketing background, working at companies like Adobe and Intuit. Frustrated with existing tools to build websites because they didn’t give you enough design control, they wanted to created a platform that would allow designers and developers to create websites without the need for coding or the constraints of pre-made templates.
Since then, Webflow has 3.5 million users, and has changed the future of web design & development.
“Webflow has given the creator economy a big boost, enabling more people to build websites at scale,” said Worklife Ventures, an early investor in Webflow & Slam client.
Webflow has been leading the no-code/low-code movement, allowing users to build websites without coding. Wix does it too, but it has its limitations. Webflow has more advanced website customizations, including the ability to create responsive websites, custom animations, and complex iterations, while hosting a powerful and flexible CMS.
Wix is simpler. It does the job and is suitable for a simple landing page or folks with very limited design skills. Wix offers pre-designed templates, drag-and-drop options.
The quick TLDR is that both Webflow and Wix offer different ways to build a website but they differ in their target audiences and level of customization and complexity. So if you’re choosing between one of them, it’ll all depend on your needs.
Let’s dive into the details and differences between Webflow and Wix.
Wix vs Webflow: Designers & Developers
If you’re a designer, Webflow is a no-brainer compared to Wix. No need to sugar coat it. Wix is for folks with limited design skills, and though both offer drag-and-drop options and templates, Webflow allows for a lot more design customization, animations, and responsive design.
Webflow is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript principles, making it more powerful and flexible than Wix. Plus, Webflow gives you control over meta information and site optimization, which are critical for high search engine visibility. We’ll go over this in the SEO section!
However, using Webflow can be more challenging for beginners. It has a steeper learning curve, requiring more time and effort to set-up and customize. As a designer, this shouldn’t be a big issue. The nice thing about Webflow is you can design directly on the platform.
Wix is mostly template-based. Though it has AI tools to help you design based on your needs, the sites are more static and have a similar look to its templates, making it difficult to create truly unique designs.
Users may also feel locked into using Wix, with limited ability to export their website to another platform. So overall, Webflow is by far a better option than Wix for designers. Recapping the pros and cons for you below!
Wix & Webflow Benefits for Designers & Developers
- Templates, templates, and more templates
- Drag and drop designers
Webflow Pros & Cons for Designers & Developers
Pros:
- Based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript principles, making it more powerful and flexible for experienced designers and developers
- Offers a more advanced and flexible content management system (CMS)
- Provides more customization options for complex interactions, animations, and responsive design. A big plus for Webflow developers and designers.
- Offers better control over SEO and site speed optimization
Cons:
- Has a steeper learning curve compared to Wix, which may be challenging for beginners
- More complex and time-consuming to set up and customize compared to Wix
- Can be more expensive compared to Wix's pricing plans
Wix Pros & Cons for Designers
Pros:
- Easier to use and more user-friendly interface, making it accessible to beginners
- Provides more templates to choose from, making it faster to get started with designing a website
- Offers an AI Designer that can help beginners design a website quickly
- Allows users to deploy mobile apps
Cons:
- Limited in design controls and customization options compared to Webflow
- Mostly template-based, making it difficult to create truly unique designs
- Users may feel locked into using Wix, with limited ability to export their website to another platform
- SEO and site speed optimization can be more limited compared to Webflow
Choosing Between Webflow or Wix CMS
When it comes to the CMS (content management system), Webflow and Wix have different approaches.
Breaking Down Wix’s CMS
Wix doesn’t have a traditional CMS. Wix offers components and applications that can function as part of a CMS. However, Wix is primarily design-driven and, therefore, is not a "pure" CMS.
As an alternative, Wix recommends creating and storing “content in collections using the Content Manager. If you need to display content from an external collection, enable Velo to connect to an external database.”
So really, Wix’s approach is static, except for specific features like e-commerce which uses Wix apps. This approach can slow down a website, limit customization, and may not be ideal for scaling businesses.
Wix’s New Standalone Product: Editor X
This is why Wix launched Editor X, a product still in beta. This is a standalone product which is similar to Webflow. Editor X's CMS is individual to each database, which means they don't connect and can be harder to manage than Webflow's. Because it’s still in beta, not all the features are available, making it hard to transfer a website from Wix to Editor X.
Wondering how Editor X compares to Webflow? Check out our latest piece on Editor X VS Webflow and find out which one is better for you and your team!
What’s Webflow’s CMS Like?
Webflow’s CMS is an upgrade from WordPress and Wix. Webflow's Designer is a visual canvas that allows you to create structured content, design your website around that content, and update it all without having to write any code. Webflow offers a customed and flexible CMS, integrating with Zapier, seamlessly connecting to other tools in your tech stack.
Introducing Webflow’s Collections
Webflow's CMS is built around the concept of Collections, which are groups of structured content.
Collections allow you to create and manage different types of content, such as blog posts, product pages, team member bios, and more. Here's how it works:
- Creating a collection: You can create a new Collection in the CMS tab of your Webflow project. You'll need to define the fields for your Collection, such as title, description, images, and any other relevant data.
- Designing collection pages: Once you've created a Collection, you can design a Collection Page template for it. This template will be used to display each item in your Collection. You can add dynamic fields to your template, such as images, text, and links.
- Adding content to collections: After creating your Collection and Collection Page template, you can start adding content to your Collection. You can do this manually by adding items one by one or by importing data using a CSV file.
- Displaying collections on your site: Once you've added content to your Collections, you can display them on your site using Collection Lists. Collection Lists allow you to display all of the items in a Collection or filter them based on certain criteria.
Our clients have used Collections to create collections for team members, blogs, and call-to-actions.
Plus, Webflow offers a course to walk you through their CMS. Check it out here.
We did a breakdown of Webflow vs WordPress here, which we’ll go over everything from CMS differences to SEO and design capabilities.
Comparing Wix’s & Webflow’s SEO
Both Webflow and Wix have SEO features that will allow you to grow your traffic through search.
While both Wix and Webflow offer SEO features, such as metadata management and redirect management, Webflow provides more advanced options for customizing URL structure, sitemaps, and the ability to do a lot of SEO stuff without adding plug-insA. If you want to use Wix for blogging, Wix has some built-in integrations with SEO plug-ins, but Webflow's lighter code and CMS integration may make it a better option for advanced SEO users.
Both Webflow and Wix offer a range of SEO features to help improve the visibility and ranking of your website in search engine results. Here are some key points to compare their SEO capabilities:
- URL Structure
- Meta Tags
- Page Speed
- Mobile Optimization
- Integrations
Webflow vs Wix SEO: URL Structure
Both Webflow and Wix allow you to customize your website's URL structure, which is important for SEO. However, Webflow offers more flexibility in this regard, allowing you to create custom URL structures for individual pages, while Wix has a more limited approach.
For example, while you can edit the end part of a Wix page URL to include your desired keywords, you cannot change the root domain name or the URL structure of other elements on the page such as blog posts or product pages. This may limit your ability to create a more optimized URL structure for your website, which can impact SEO.
Wix vs Webflow: SEO Meta Tags
Both Webflow and Wix allow you to add SEO meta tags, snippets of code that provide information about a webpage to Google. These tags are typically placed in the head section of a webpage's HTML code. There are different types of SEO tags, including:
- Title tag: Your title and how it shows up on search engines
- Meta description tag: Describes what your page is about
- Keywords tag: keywords on your page
Download our SEO terms explained, a guide to walk you through each SEO word and how it affects your site.
So who’s the winner here? Webflow.
Webflow allows you to customize meta titles, descriptions, and keyword for all pages and even Collections. The platform also allows you to set-up re-directs, create a sitemap automatically, while allowing you to make changes in real-time.
With Wix, you can customize meta titles, descriptions, and keywords for each page, but you cannot add structured data or customize meta tags for collections. While Wix also offers the ability to set-up 301 redirects, it lacks some of the more advanced features that Webflow provides. For example, it can’t help you create a hierarchical site (H1, H2, H3) in an easy structured way.
Webflow vs Wix SEO: Page Speed
A site that loads fast can make you out-beat your competitor because it gives your users a great experience. Search engines appreciate that too. Imagine a site that loads in 1 second vs 10 seconds.
Both platforms have tools to minimize the amount of time it takes to load a site. However, Webflow's built-in optimization features are more comprehensive, with options to compress images, minify CSS and JavaScript, and enable browser caching. Let’s break it down:
- Code Efficiency: Wix uses a lot of code to launch your site, which makes it slower to load. The more code, the longer it takes for the browser to load and render the website. Webflow, on the other hand, uses a more efficient code structure, which helps to improve website speed and performance.
- Server Response Time: Wix websites are hosted on Wix's own servers, which can be slower than other hosting providers. In contrast, Webflow uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host its websites, which offers faster server response times.
- Caching: Webflow automatically optimizes website caching to improve website performance, while Wix does not offer as much control over caching. Caching is important because it allows browsers to store website data locally, reducing the need to download it from the server every time a user visits the website.
Webflow vs Wix SEO: Mobile Optimization
The good news is that both Webflow and Wix provide mobile-responsive design. When it comes to SEO, mobile design is important, because Google will prioritize mobile-first indexing, which means that they look at the mobile version of a website first when ranking search results. Websites that are not optimized for mobile devices may not rank as high!
As mentioned, Webflow's mobile design capabilities are more flexible and customizable. With Webflow, you can design separate layouts for different devices and screen sizes, allowing you to optimize your website for a variety of mobile devices.
With Wix, once you design your website, the platform automatically optimizes it for different devices. While this approach is more straightforward, it does not allow for as much customization and optimization for specific mobile devices.
Additionally, here are some additional features from each platform!
Wix offers:
- Google Search Console built-in
- SEM Rush integration natively
- Built-in canonical management
Webflow offers:
- The ability to create a custom sitemap
- Better asset management, allowing you to add alt-text to all images
- The ability to launch programmatic pages!
If you’d like to measure your SEO results, download our calculator!
Webflow VS Wix Pricing
Webflow offers tiered pricing based on your existing needs. The larger you get, the more expensive it’ll be.
Webflow Pricing
The Starter Plan is free, but should only be used when you’re developing a brand new site. It’s limited to 50 CMS items, which is not that much.
The Basic Plan gives folks more flexibility, but because it doesn’t allow for a CMS, we don’t think is the best option either.
Webflow’s best plan is the CMS plan at $23/month or $296 annual. You can see why. It allows 2,000 CMS items, 1,000 submissions to a built-in form, and multiple editors.
With Webflow, you can also build an e-commerce platform with their built-in payment processing and order fulfillment options for an additional monthly cost. Plus, Webflow’s hosting makes the maintenance of your site smooth, because their sites are hosted on AWS.
Wix Pricing
Wix has different pricing models based on your needs too. They don’t have a free plan and their pricing options start at $16/month.
The plans range from basic website building to more advanced ecommerce features. The Basic plan is similar to Webflow’s. It’s very limited and it doesn't include any CMS capabilities.
Wix's most popular plan is the Business Unlimited Plan at $22 per month. This plan includes:
- Custom domain
- Free domain for 1 year
- Remove Wix ads
- SSL certificate
- 5GB storage space
- 1H of video hours
Wix’s hosting is on their own servers. While they don't use AWS like Webflow, their hosting is still reliable and secure.
Is Webflow Better Than Wix?
At Slam, we’re big fans of Webflow, so the answer is yes! We’re certified Webflow experts, too.
Why Move From Wix to Webflow?
If you want a website that can scale, Webflow is your go-to.
Wix is certainly the easier of the two solutions to use, and is great for quickly standing up a site. It has a wide range of templates to choose from and AI-powered designs can help you move quickly. However, Wix is more limited than Webflow when it comes to customization. Most of Wix is template-based, and making something truly custom may not yield as great results. Additionally, Wix's e-commerce functionality is more full-featured but comes at the cost of being locked into Wix until you redesign your stack.
Webflow, on the other hand, gives you more room to scale and build the way you want. It has lighter code and faster page speed, which can lead to better SEO and user experience. You can also integrate with your own tech stack, which gives you more flexibility and control over your website.
Webflow also allows for custom code editing and offers tools like Wized and Memberstack, which allow you to build out applications and membership sites with fewer constraints compared to Wix's approach.
If you’re looking to scale, building on Webflow will save you so much time and resources. Check out some of our favorite redesigns through Webflow, like Acumen America and Kai XR!
Wonder how Webflow compares to a tool like Squarespace? Check out our comparison of Squarespace VS Webflow!
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