Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
$489
Webflow
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Webflow headquartered in San Francisco offers what they describe as a visual solution to web design, with a CMS for editors, designers, and developers that they state allows users to create needed content structures, add content (by hand, from a CSV, or via our API), and then design it visually. Webflow service plans also include website hosting, with a basic plan for sites that don't need a CMS as well as CMS, Business, and Enterprise plans. Webflow's ecommerce plans are designed to support new…
Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack, Dropbox and Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
Webflow is great for designing pages and creating a really nice looking website, without needing to be a pro designer. However, trying to scale a company blog for SEO leaves a lot of room for desire. There are various SEO-related shortcomings (like how canonical tags are added to pages) and I also need to add a lot of custom code elements to blog posts to get the desired control. This means adding new posts and getting them looking the way we want takes way more time than it should do. Also doesn't support next-gen images, which is impacting our page speed scores and leaving us behind when it comes to Core Web Vitals update. Finally, the fact that only one person can enter the designer at one time is really annoying. I get that the Editor should be the solution to this, but it's so so so slow and jumpy that this is essentially unusable.
Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.
It is extremely easy to use, especially with available templates and guides. It is used primarily by accounts and creative rather than dev. It is also easy to import/export projects or duplicate them for re-use and modification for another client. While it is rarely the end platform for a deliverable, it is often instrumental in pitching.
In my experience, their customer service is an absolute joke, I tried reaching out to them they took forever. I had to keep following up with them as if they never received it in the first place. It’s a new platform, so guidance is needed. Tried the university they offer, in my opinion, it is completely useless, I would just completely move on from this website.
In my opinion, it is horrible, the rendering takes forever. I have the newest MacBook and the platform will still lag and slow down on me. I’m not a developer, I am a designer which makes it worst because I am using the features they are providing not extra coding features. In my opinion, it is a horrible platform really, stay away.
We pay hundreds of dollars a month to Webflow, yet their support is worse than a typical free SaaS product. We were prevented from deploying changes to our site because of how Webflow structures its support. It delayed a product launch for the whole company. Support options? Beg for help on community forums, it took a threat to email the CEO to finally get movement. If there were easy alternatives, we would switch. But for now we just pray nothing breaks and that we don't need to interact with Webflow support.
In the past we've used WordPress to manage documentation content. WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
The code quality and speed can't even be compared to Elementor; Webflow is simply a much better tool. Instapage has a cool feature for dynamic landing pages, which changes according to Google Ads Keyword, which I miss; however, amazing webflow community members recreated that functionality with a custom script. For the majority of users, it's a safer bet than WordPress in terms of speed and code quality. WordPress could provide amazing results if hosted properly (nginx, caching configuration) and requires best practices to maintain code quality. Webflow solves these issues out of the box at a fraction of cost.
I feel it doesn’t perform the way it’s supposed to and it doesn’t have any beneficial factors to it. In my opinion, there is no reason to use a platform like this when Wix and Shopify, and WordPress exist. I believe Webflow is a platform that shouldn’t exist and it’s only popular because of the hype it received. I tried it and hate it completely.
