Framer is a zero-code website builder offering a fully featured interactive design canvas that’s optimized for designing sites. Alternately, users can start in Figma and copy to Framer later. Framer features a built-in CMS, and optional premium hosting options with customizable application limits, and no hard hosting limits.
Framer is a great tool for launching quick and beautiful websites. The Figma-like design and Webflow-like production capabilities make it complete tool for this purpose. While it works alright for lightweight CMS content, it's less suited for large, content-heavy websites and blogs that strictly rely on SEO.
Marvel is a very strong tool in scenarios where designers seek to quickly create simple prototypes on their desktops using a simple, intuitive interface. It offers “just enough” functionality to create somewhat realistic designs to present to stakeholders and other designers. However, there’s a limit to how “realistic” those designs can be, given that Marvel has somewhat limited functionality around animations. Marvel is not a strong option for those who want to create very complex prototypes with many animations, or for those who want to edit prototypes on their tablet or phone. Marvel is a jewel for simplicity but starts to be difficult to use when creating complicated designs. For creating more complicated prototypes, I would recommend a more robust tool, such as Axure.
I really miss being able to duplicate, make a copy of the prototype I'm working on. Sometimes, I want to make a comparison with detail changes and without being able to duplicate it is difficult.
Compared to other similar services, I feel the animations could be more fluid and smoother.
It could have more free sophisticated icons and images.
We primarily used Figma for design prototyping and Webflow for turning them into live websites. Framer does it all in the same place without sacrificing design freedom and quality. It's our go-to tool unless clients want something else
Ultimately, InVision was just a better fit for our company's needs. It's probably faster to create prototypes using Marvel, but InVision's collaboration features (comments, notes, etc.) are much more robust, which was helpful for our large team spread across multiple continents. InVision also offers more advanced features, and Marvel felt a little too limited for our overall business needs.
