Should you use Webstudio? Confessions from a Webflow junkie.

Webstudio — the Webflow dupe?

I don’t know about you, but I’m cheap.

That might sound flippant, but it’s also informed by experience. I’ve spent a lot of time working with Webflow. At my previous startup, I used Webflow to build a company directory with over 2,000 pages. Choosing Webflow back then was absolutely the right decision — it gave us the flexibility to expand the site significantly over time, and it held up.

Webflow is powerful. There’s an entire ecosystem around it, and people are doing genuinely impressive things — from complex CMS setups to full-on marketplaces. From a company perspective, Webflow is well worth the money.

But my needs today are different.

For a personal blogger, hobbyist, or small company that isn’t making money off its website, keeping costs low matters. I don’t need my site to scale to millions of users. I need it to exist, look good, and not nickel-and-dime me every month.

That’s what led me to Webstudio.

I was looking for a state-of-the-art front-end website builder — something in the same league as Webflow or Framer — without paying relatively high per-site costs, and without being locked into a closed system.

On first glance, Webstudio looks quite a bit cheaper. You can host multiple websites on the same subscription (though they’ve quietly announced that this might change). It costs about $20/month, or $15/month if you go for the annual plan.

In comparison, Webflow charges roughly $14–18/month per site on the Basic plan, and $23–29/month per site on the CMS plan.

So far, so good.

The cost illusion

On second glance, though, the math gets more complicated.

But, on second glance, if you plan to use Webstudio out the box (using their hosting) and don’t have that many websites, and would like some form of CMS, it’s not longer obviously cost-advantageous.

This is where the cost comparison starts to break down.

Webflow’s CMS is deeply integrated. You pay for it, but you don’t have to think about it. Webstudio, on the other hand, does not ship with a native CMS.

Which means…

The CMS reality nobody highlights

If you want dynamic content — a blog, case studies, articles — you’ll need to bring your own CMS.

That opens up an entire landscape of headless CMS options, and they all come with trade-offs. Good ones that come with all features can be very costly. The free ones usually lacks certain functions. Different CMSes are good for different use cases.

In my case, since I want to have a blog, I will need to have one that allows images inside rich text. If you decide to use WordPress as a headless CMS (which is common, and honestly not a bad choice), you still need to:

• pay for hosting
• run and maintain a WordPress instance
• deal with WordPress as infrastructure, not a “simple blog tool”

At that point, the “Webstudio is cheaper” argument starts to wobble. The costs don’t disappear — they just move around.

The learning curve (read this carefully)

There’s also a real learning curve to Webstudio.

If you already know Webflow, the interface will look familiar. The visual editor, the mental model — all of that maps fairly well.

What doesn’t map well is everything around it.

Setting up a CMS integration requires tinkering. You need to understand how data is fetched, how images are handled, and what happens when you export the site. This is not “click a few buttons and you’re done” territory.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Webflow is already difficult for a layperson.

Webstudio adds another layer of complexity on top.

If you’ve read this far and you’re still not sure what a CMS is, or why it might be “headless”, you should probably stay away from Webstudio — at least for now.

That’s not gatekeeping. It’s just being honest.

Why I didn’t walk away

But I digress.

While I am not a programmer by any means, I do have enough technical context, and honestly enough patience, to push through the hurdles. I don’t love the complexity — I tolerate it, mainly because I am cheap and I care about control.

For people like me, Webstudio sits in a strange but interesting middle ground:

• more powerful and flexible than most no-code tools
• less polished and forgiving than Webflow
• but far less restrictive in the long run

And that leads to the single biggest reason I stuck with it.

The one killer advantage Webstudio has

Webstudio lets you export your entire site — even on the free plan.

You can export it as:

• static files (HTML / CSS / JS), or
• a JavaScript app that supports dynamic content and CMS integrations.

Once exported, the site is yours. You can host it wherever you want, on your own terms.

If you’re smart about this, you can run multiple websites very cheaply. And for small-timers like us, cost avoidance is usually the wisest strategy.

To put this into perspective, **Webflow also allows exports — but only on paid plans, and with a long list of caveats.

You’ve probably had the same thought I did at some point:

“What if I just pay for a month, export the site, and then cancel?”

You’re not the only sneaky one.

The problem is that this approach breaks down quickly if you want to:

• build more than one or two sites
• maintain them over time
• or use a CMS in any serious way

Here’s why Webflow exports become awkward fast:

• On the Starter Workspace, you can only have two staging sites. If you want more, you need a paid Workspace plan — on top of individual Site Plans.
• Once a site is exported and removed from your workspace, you can’t re-import it to continue editing it in the visual builder.
• CMS content is exported as static pages. Every CMS update means re-exporting and re-uploading the entire site.
• The free plan caps you at 50 CMS items, full stop.

By contrast, these problems simply don’t exist with Webstudio:

• You don’t need a paid plan to export your site.
• Even on the free plan, you can create sites, export them, maintain them, and re-export them whenever something changes.
• Because the CMS is external, there’s no hard limit on the number of CMS items (depending on what CMS solution you choose).
• You can even use multiple CMSes on a single site — for example:
  • WordPress as a headless CMS for blog content
  • Airtable for customer data
  • Notion for a public roadmap

All of that can be pulled into one Webstudio front end, giving you fine-grained control over where your data lives.

That changes the risk profile for me completely.

So… should you use Webstudio?

If you’re reading this article, I’m going to assume you already know what Webflow and Framer are.

Let’s get the obvious part out of the way first.

Who Webstudio is not for

Webstudio is not a beginner tool.

If you barely managed to get a site together using Squarespace, Wix, or Hostinger’s website builder, and the idea of hosting, deployments, or CMS integrations already stresses you out — Webstudio is not for you.

That’s not a value judgment. It’s simply the wrong abstraction level.

Webstudio assumes:

• basic understanding of web design concepts
• some familiarity with website infrastructure
• willingness to deal with publishing and maintenance details

If that sounds unappealing, you’ll have a bad time.

Who Webstudio is a great fit for

If you already enjoy working with Webflow or Framer, but:

• want more control over your data
• care about long-term cost
• and don’t mind technical complexity
• have multiple sites

then Webstudio can be extremely cost-effective.

It lets you build beautiful, mobile-responsive websites you can actually be proud of, often at a fraction of what comparable setups would cost over time.

There’s a learning curve, yes. But if you have the appetite for it, the payoff is real.

Agencies and multi-site builders

If you’re a web design agency selling completed projects that include hosting, Webstudio is close to a godsend.

Once you’ve absorbed the initial complexity, your marginal cost per additional website is essentially zero. You can build, export, host, and maintain multiple client sites without stacking per-site SaaS fees on top of each other.

That alone makes Webstudio very compelling in an agency context.

When Webflow is still the better choice

If you’re not particularly cost-sensitive, or you’re a company with some scale, I would still strongly recommend Webflow (or Framer).

Having a single, integrated platform that:

• houses your CMS
• handles hosting
• abstracts away deployments
• and has a deep talent pool

is a massive operational advantage.

Once you start involving multiple CMSes, custom deployments, and external data sources, you increase complexity. That complexity slows teams down and makes hiring the right person to run your website harder and more expensive.

Webflow is also far more mainstream. There are many more designers, developers, agencies, and templates available. You can go very far with a single technically savvy web designer and keep things simple.

For most companies, that trade-off is worth the higher price.

In conclusion

I still like Webflow. A lot.

If I were building a company website again — something that needs to be maintained by a team, handed off to contractors, and evolve quickly without too much operational overhead — I’d probably reach for Webflow without overthinking it. It’s polished, predictable, and widely understood. Those things matter more than people like to admit.

But I also don’t regret moving to Webstudio for my own projects.

Webstudio forces you to understand what you’re doing. It makes trade-offs explicit. You pay with complexity instead of money, and in return you get control, flexibility, and a much lower long-term cost. For personal sites, side projects, and multi-site setups, that trade-off can be entirely rational.

The mistake is not choosing Webflow or Webstudio.

The mistake is choosing a tool without understanding what kind of cost you’re actually paying — money, time, or complexity.

If you’re comfortable paying with money to buy simplicity, Webflow is still one of the best options out there. If you’d rather invest time upfront to avoid recurring costs and lock-in later, Webstudio is worth the friction.

Neither choice is “better” in the abstract. They’re optimized for different constraints.

In the next post, I’ll get concrete and technical: how Webstudio exports actually work, what happens once you introduce a headless CMS, and what self-hosting this setup really looks like in practice, so that you too can get through this in one piece ;)

Some questions you might have…(FAQs)

How much does it actually cost to self-host?

In my case, very little.

I bought my hosting from Hostinger for about €2.50 per month. That price came from a Black Friday deal, so I can’t guarantee you’ll see the same number on a random Tuesday (but they have sales all the time, and you can go on Youtube to see if any Youtuber is giving out discount codes).

For the JavaScript app export, I’m currently using Netlify, which is free until you hit meaningful traffic. At that point, upgrading is optional and predictable.

So for multiple small personal sites and side projects, my total monthly cost is effectively €2.50.

If you don’t want to go through the trouble of self-hosting, I think paying $15-20 per month for multiple projects is still very reasonable.

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Why not just use WordPress?

I dislike WordPress with a passion.

Yes, WordPress can do almost anything, but only through plugins. Lots of them. Even basic functionality often requires installing, configuring, and maintaining third-party extensions, each with its own update cycle and failure modes.

The default editor, Gutenberg, doesn’t even offer proper responsive breakpoints out of the box, which means you have very little control over how your site looks on mobile.

To build something that feels current in 2026, you’ll almost certainly end up paying for a more sophisticated page-builder plugin, like Elementor or Divi.

It doesn’t stop there: every plugin eventually asks for a subscription fee. Over time, the monthly recurring fees add up, at which point WordPress stops being the “cheap” option people claim it is.

There’re also lots of security problems with Wordpress — but I’ll stop here because I don’t want to turn this into a rant post.

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Why not just use Hostinger’s website builder?

To be fair, Hostinger’s built-in website builder is actually quite decent.

It’s fast, easy to use, and included in the hosting plan. For very simple sites, that might be all you need.

But it has some important limitations:

• The blogging functionality is basic
• You can’t create reusable components or proper templates
• More complex layouts quickly become awkward
• Exporting your site is not straightforward (there’s only an export-to-WordPress option)

For anything beyond a link tree or simple brochure site, it starts to feel restrictive. And once again, you’re locked into a system that’s hard to migrate away from later.

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