Google Compute Engine vs. Webflow

You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.

Incentivized

Since the purpose in my case is to build a small professional looking site to present project outcomes and other research, I can create custom fields and design experimentations. Webflow builds sites that are super professional, with many amazing templates that don't look cheap. Additionally, I can test responsive layouts. Apart from this, I used 1-2 static pages to illustrate key findings for example what a multilingual site could look like with screenshots without needing CMS in free version, which are all the valuable skills to acquire. Compared to WordPress, Webflow is expensive with limited free features, although it has really cool additional features that will make the site I build stand out.

Incentivized

• Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
• Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
• Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs

Incentivized

• Saves time- because I don't have to do double entry of content.
• It saves money. I like that it is an all-in-one system, so I don't have to host elsewhere.
• Flexibility - Webflow provides me with a lot of flexibility in my webpage design, allowing me to adjust pages as needed, depending on the content types.

Incentivized

• Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
• Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
• Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.

Incentivized

• Brand recognition is still behind WordPress, which can make it a challenging sell for clients looking to play it safe in their CMS decision.
• The CMS is ideal for smaller datasets, but higher content sites introduce some minor challenges.
• Alignment between designers and developers is key prior to implementation. The flexibility of the platform requires careful planning to avoid over-engineering.

Incentivized

Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.

Incentivized

It's the perfect balance of GUI and code control

Incentivized

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

Webflow is very easy for a beginner to get started with and achieve good results, but to achieve an expert level of understanding requires experience and some web development knowledge. HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript knowledge aren't required to use Webflow, but an expert will know BEM class naming patterns, be able to create reusable elements and design systems, and add 3rd party integrations that require custom code.

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes

Incentivized

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.

It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.

Incentivized

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.

• The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

I haven't had to engage them from a support perspective; however, there is a considerable user community for tips/ideas/troubleshooting and the like. I believe the Pro plan supports additional resources but we didn't find that the cost justified the outcome. Overall the need for support has been relatively minor.

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.

Incentivized

A lot more design control and easier to create a custom site, and then also to scale that site going forward. There's a lot about WordPress I miss, though, when it comes to managing a blog—user permissions, SEO control, edit HTML version of posts.

Incentivized

It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.

Incentivized

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.

• With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
• As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.

Incentivized

• Webflow vast marketing makes it easy for me to sell the product
• Webflow has been growing so much in recent year that more and more clients ask for it, and the demand is only increasing.
• Big companies understand the power of Webflow and big companies tend to have a large budget for their web projects.

Incentivized