On this page
Every one of these can build a good website. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The question is never which is best — it is which is best for the thing you are doing, the people who will maintain it, and the next three years.
We build on all four, so we have no particular reason to flatter any of them.
The short version
| WordPress | Webflow | Framer | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best at | Content-heavy sites | Designed marketing sites | Fast, visually ambitious sites | Getting live quickly |
| Who maintains it | You or a developer | You, after a learning curve | You, fairly easily | Anyone |
| Design freedom | Total | Very high | Very high | Within templates |
| Ongoing cost | Hosting plus upkeep | Monthly per site | Monthly per site | Monthly per site |
| Can you export it? | Yes, entirely | Partially | No | No |
| Handles 500+ pages | Comfortably | Within CMS limits | Less suited | Awkwardly |
| Updates and security | Your responsibility | Theirs | Theirs | Theirs |
WordPress
Still runs a large share of the web, and for good reasons: it is open, it is genuinely yours, and there is very little it cannot be made to do.
Its real strength is the content model. If your site has services, projects, case studies, team members and a blog that each need their own fields, WordPress handles that natively, and the editing experience can be made genuinely pleasant — labelled fields for exactly what that thing needs, and nothing else on the screen.
It is also the only one of the four where “we need it to talk to our booking system” is routinely answerable with yes.
The honest downside. It needs maintaining: updates, backups, security, somebody noticing when a plugin update breaks something. And its reputation for being slow and bloated is earned — not by WordPress itself, but by the commercial themes and page builders most sites are built with. A well-built WordPress site is extremely fast. A typical one is not. That distinction is the whole of why we build custom themes instead of using a page builder.
Choose it when the site is content-heavy, you need full control, you want to own what you paid for, or you have to integrate with something unusual.
Webflow
Webflow gives designers real control over layout without writing code, and the markup it produces is clean. Hosting, SSL and a global CDN are included, and there is no update treadmill at all. For a marketing site that needs to look designed rather than assembled, it is excellent.
Its CMS is capable — proper collections with typed fields and references between them — which puts it well ahead of the template-based builders for anything structured.
The honest downside. The learning curve is steeper than the marketing suggests, because it exposes the actual box model: people arriving expecting drag-and-drop find themselves learning flexbox. That is fine for a studio and a real cost for a small in-house team. Pricing is per site per month and climbs as you add CMS items or seats. And export gives you the front end but not the CMS, so leaving is possible without being painless.
Choose it when design precision matters, the content model is moderate, and you would rather pay a subscription than maintain a server. There is more on where the line falls in Webflow or WordPress, and how we choose.
Framer
The newest of the four and the fastest to design in. It began as a prototyping tool and grew into a publishing platform, which shows in the best way: the canvas feels like a design tool rather than an admin panel, and the sites it produces are quick without anyone having to think about it.
Motion is its stand-out feature. Scroll effects and transitions that would be a developer ticket elsewhere are properties here, which changes the shape of a project — when somebody asks “what if the hero were shorter”, you find out in thirty seconds rather than next week.
The honest downside. It is young. The CMS is simpler than Webflow’s, the plugin ecosystem is small, and there is no export at all — what you build stays there. For a startup site or a product launch that is usually an acceptable trade. For a ten-year institutional site it is a real commitment, and worth reading alongside who actually owns your website.
There is also a discipline problem that is not the tool’s fault: when animation is this easy to add, sites get animated more than they should be. The restraint has to come from you.
Choose it when speed of design matters, the site is visually ambitious, and the content is relatively contained.
Squarespace
It gets unfairly sneered at by people who build websites for a living. For a small business that needs to be online next week — with a domain, hosting, SSL and a decent-looking template included and nothing to maintain — it is frequently the correct answer, and recommending something more complicated would be doing that client a disservice.
The honest downside. You are decorating within a template rather than designing. Push against it and you will hit a wall, usually around custom layouts or anything structurally unusual, and the workarounds get ugly fast. Performance is middling and largely out of your hands.
Choose it when budget is tight, the site is straightforward, and nobody internally wants to think about it ever again.
The four questions that actually decide it
Forget feature lists. These settle it most of the time.
- Who updates this on a Tuesday afternoon? If the answer is a non-technical colleague between two other jobs, the editing experience matters more than everything else on this page combined.
- How much structured content is there? A dozen pages is a different problem from four hundred products with filters, and the platforms diverge sharply as that number grows.
- What does it have to connect to? Unusual integrations push you towards WordPress quickly.
- What happens in three years? If there is any chance you need to move, start somewhere you can move from.
What does not decide it
SEO. You will read that one platform is better for search than the others. It is almost entirely untrue. Google cares about speed, structure, mobile behaviour and whether the content is any good — all four can do that well and all four can do it badly. Build quality matters enormously; the logo on the platform does not. We go through what actually moves the needle in SEO basics for small businesses.
What other people in your industry use. Their constraints are not yours.
The sticker price of the platform. It is almost always the smallest number in the project. The cost of a site that nobody can update, or that has to be rebuilt early, dwarfs any subscription.
A reasonable default
If you want a rule of thumb rather than a decision framework: content-heavy and long-lived goes to WordPress; design-led marketing site with a moderate CMS goes to Webflow; visually ambitious and fast-moving goes to Framer; small, simple and self-managed goes to Squarespace.
Then check it against the four questions above, because the rule of thumb is wrong often enough to be worth checking.
We work across WordPress, Webflow, Framer and Squarespace, and the recommendation changes per project. Tell us the situation and we will tell you which one we would pick, and why.
