Webflow vs Wordpress 2025

So, you’re building a website.

Maybe it’s for you, maybe it’s for your client, but regardless - you have to decide where you’re going to build it.

While WordPress is the most popular way to build a site (over 40% of the web is powered by WordPress), Webflow is a newer contender which is getting popular very, very quickly. Since their release in 2013, they now power over 1% of the internet. While that doesn’t sound like much, believe me, it is!

Who am I?

My name is Julian, I work at Memberstack. I’ve been a web developer for almost 10 years, and I’ve been a Webflow power user for over 7 years. Recently, I’ve got back into WordPress, and now I’m using both of the 2 CMSs pretty much evenly. I see a whole bunch of talk in both communities where people say that one is better than the other - as someone who uses (and loves) both, I’d like to explain the differences between the two, talk about some of their strengths and weaknesses, and share my thoughts on when and why to use one vs the other.

I’m really excited to make this video because while there are plenty of videos on YouTube that cover this topic, many of them are made by either Webflow or WordPress freelancers/agencies, who, let’s face it, can be slightly biased. Like I said, I work at Memberstack - a tool that allows you to add user logins, signups, gated content, and subscriptions to your site - both for Webflow, and for WordPress. That means you can rest assured that this video was made to give you the most accurate and fair view of both CMSs.

What is WordPress?

Let’s start with WordPress. WordPress came out in 2003 and is an open source software - this means that there’s no centralized ownership, and it’s improved upon by it’s contributors. This also means that anyone, including you, can see and edit the code that actually makes WordPress function on your website. As a product, WordPress is very bare bones, and you can’t really do all that much with it until you install plugins and themes. Contrary to what some people say/think, WordPress is alive and thriving in 2025, with a massive community pushing to keep it as the champion of CMSs.

What is Webflow?

Webflow was released 10 years later (2013) and is a SaaS product - software as a service. Webflow is a private company based in San Francisco. As a product, Webflow is (for the most part) an all-in-one tool. You can simply sign up for an account with Webflow, create a site, build it, launch it, and manage it - all from within the same platform. While some people may call Webflow a ‘drag and drop’ tool for beginners, it is anything but - there’s a reason why many people make a living off building Webflow sites for clients as an agency, or as a freelancer.

Pricing

WordPress

Since WordPress is an open source software, it doesn’t actually cost anything. You can go and get the code for free, and start running WordPress!

That being said, a website is far, far more than a CMS. You have to consider things like;

• Hosting
• Security
• Plugins (or writing your own code)
• Backups

And much, much more.

So - while WordPress itself is free, running a site built with WordPress is almost never free. While a simple hobby site can be run for as little as $2 a month, if you have a complicated site with lots of premium plugins and you have more intensive hosting needs, your monthly operational costs can soar well into the hundreds, and even thousands of dollars.

That being said, from what I’ve seen, most WordPress sites cost between $2-25 a month to run.

Webflow

Now, let’s talk about Webflow - Webflow’s pricing is complicated, to say the least.

Webflow pricing can be broken down into the following categories - all of which need to be considered;

• Workspace plan
• Site/hosting plan
• Add-ons
• Third party tools

While I’m not going to review the exact pricing of each plan and add-on, I will explain each one briefly so you can understand what you’re going to be up against.

Workspace plans

If you only have one site, you probably won’t need to pay for a Workspace plan. That being said, if you have multiple sites and multiple people on your team need access to them, you will need to pay for a workspace plan. Paid Workspace plans start at $24/m and go up to $60/m, and that price is billed per seat - along with some extra benefits like free guest seats.

Site/hosting plans

Site plans as Webflow calls them are necessary for you to put your site on a custom domain. Webflow’s site plans start at $18/m, and go up to $364/m for a business site with the highest bandwidth and CMS item count. Webflow also has enterprise offerings which can go to $10,000 a month and beyond.

Add-ons

Webflow also has a couple of add-ons, which are newer to the ecosystem. You can think of these like plugins, but they were made and are maintained by the actual Webflow team.

• Localization: Enable multiple languages on your site, starting at $9/m
• Analyze: Analytics for Webflow, starting at $29/m
• Optimize: AI powered AB testing - starting at $299/m

Third party tools

Depending on what you need to do, there are various third-party tools that allow you to do things which Webflow otherwise wouldn’t - such as, adding logins and gated content to your site - that’s what our tool, Memberstack does. There are lots of third party tools for different needs at different price points. You can think of these like WordPress plugins.

Overall

Overall, Webflow is typically more expensive than WordPress - that being said, as a SaaS product, you are getting things such as uptime guarantees, maintenance, and more included in that price. Depending on the project you’re working on, the development costs and time needed to maintain your WordPress site can easily eclipse the (higher) cost of Webflow’s hosting.

Getting started

WordPress

The thing about WordPress is that it makes YOU do all the work. Every site needs basic stuff such as hosting, and with WordPress, you will need to figure that out for yourself. That being said, tools like LocalWP and domain providers like GoDaddy and Namecheap make the process much easier, so that anyone, even someone without any prior web development experience, can get started easily with WordPress.

With WordPress, there are some things that every site will need to have.

Builder

WordPress has tons of page builders, ranging from easy and rigid, to advanced and flexible. The most popular page builder is Elementor, and my personal favorite is Bricks Builder - which actually has a very similar building experience to Webflow.

Plugins

Every site will need some sort of plugins - for example, if you need to extend the CMS, you might want to use Advanced Custom Fields, and if you want to take subscription payments, you might want to use Memberstack - at the start, you’re probably going to be confused, but it won’t take you long to figure out the plugins that you add to every single site.

Webflow

Webflow is much easier to get started with as it gives you everything needed to launch your website right out of the box. That being said, the development experience with Webflow is ‘visual development’ - meaning, development terms such as margin, padding, flex, etc are used throughout the designer. If you have some knowledge of HTML/CSS, you will feel right at home in Webflow. But, if you’re brand new to web development, you might find it to be harder than something like Elementor, which is made to be easy for anyone.

Building a site

Now that we’ve figured out our budget and we’ve got our site set up, let’s talk about the actual development experience in Webflow vs WordPress.

WordPress

I would describe building with WordPress as 2 things - limitless, but fragmented.

As I mentioned earlier, you can actually edit the code of WordPress itself - so, there’s almost nothing you can’t do on your WordPress site, given you know how to code or work with a developer.

There are also tons of plugins that make it a breeze to do almost anything - from basic stuff such as creating forms, to niche things your use case might need such as recipes.

The downside of this ecosystem-based approach is what most Webflow developers complain about when it comes to WordPress - and that is fragmentation.

Often, you’re using multiple plugins on your site, and you want the 2 of them to work together. For example, let’s say you’re using Bricks Builder and a form building plugin.

Unless that plugin was developed with Bricks Builder in mind, they can often be incompatible unless you resort to custom code.

So, while you’ll delight in the fact that almost anything is possible with WordPress, you’re also likely to have a few frustrated moments due to different plugins/builders not playing nicely with one another.

As for the page building experience, this totally depends on which builder you use. You can use something like Divi to have an easier, drag and drop experience, something like Bricks Builder will give you a more advanced, Webflow-like experience, and you can even use custom HTML, CSS, and PHP to create your own pages.

Webflow

Webflow on the other hand, is not fragmented at all. Virtually everything your site needs is handled by native Webflow features, and even third-party tools such as Memberstack were made to work perfectly with Webflow. Virtually anything you want to develop with Webflow has tutorials and documentation on the internet.

Building with Webflow is a very enjoyable experience - you can pretty much develop anything you can design, and popular frameworks such as Client-First by Finsweet will make it so you can rapidly develop a completely custom website.

The problem with Webflow arises when you run into limitations. While Webflow was made to be limitless in terms of design, you may find yourself running into certain limitations which often require custom code to circumvent. That being said, Webflow has made some excellent updates over the past few years such as the custom element, which allow you to build anything you want.

Third-party tools that were made for Webflow such as Memberstack & Wized even allow you to build custom web apps with Webflow.

Maintaining your site

WordPress

The common theme with WordPress is that it leaves you to do pretty much everything, including maintenance.

WordPress itself has updates, and so do all of the plugins and themes you get on your site. While these are usually as simple as a one-click update, sometimes, an update could break your entire site. It’s precisely for that reason why it’s important to keep backups and thoroughly test your site before and after any plugins are updated.

Along with that, WordPress sites are commonly hacked - that’s not WordPress’s fault, but bad code, outdated plugins, weak passwords, and more can make your website a hot target for all sorts of bad actors. It is up to you to ensure your WordPress site is secure against hackers.

Webflow

Remember that higher hosting cost we discussed with Webflow? Well, this is where it pays off.

Since Webflow is a SaaS product, your monthly hosting bill covers maintenance. The Webflow team handles virtually everything your site needs to keep on functioning, along with security to make sure your site isn’t hacked.

Something I notice often is people complaining about the high price of Webflow - but, if you calculate your hourly rate and the amount of time it takes you to maintain your WordPress site, you will often save money with Webflow > WordPress.

Ecosystems & communities

Both Webflow and WordPress have thriving ecosystems of tools, educators, and developers which keep the tools alive. While WordPress undeniably has the larger ecosystem, there is a large and passionate community of Webflow developers, agencies, and more all around the world who create tools, tutorials, and more. In fact, there were over 200 people when I was at Flowconf last year - a conference run by the Flow Ninja team in the south of Serbia. As someone who’s been in the Webflow community for almost a decade, it’s really cool to see the growth.

One area where I’d definitely say the WordPress ecosystem thrives is in other languages - if you don’t speak English, you will have trouble finding tutorials for Webflow. WordPress on the other hand has thousands of community-made tutorials in virtually any language you can imagine, and the community is strong all around the globe.

Final thoughts

Both Webflow and WordPress are excellent ways to build a site, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The CMS you use ultimately depends on your experience, your preferences, and the requirements of the project you’re working on.

Personally, I use both WordPress and Webflow regularly, and I couldn’t tell you which one is better - it all depends on the project I’m working on.