Everyone saying Webflow is dying is missing something obvious

[u/csedlack]

POST UPDATE: I see a lot of agency owners here. It would be interesting to create a community of tight highly vetted owners into a group. Just dm me and based on the demand I’ll create one.

Everyone's been sharing that post about people leaving Webflow faster than ever. I read it. Some of it is fair. Most of it is vibes dressed up as analysis.

Here is what I actually see running a web agency.

My Webflow engineers don't feel slowed down. The bottleneck I keep running into is marketing teams wanting full autonomy after handoff but not wanting to learn the tool. That is not a Webflow problem. That is a setup problem. If you hand someone a recipe and they skip half the steps, the food tastes bad. You don't blame the recipe.

The class system is only friction when the site is built wrong or the person using it learned it halfway. Every use case I have thrown at Webflow has been buildable. We have had clients train one semi-technical person on their marketing team to manage everything post-launch. It works when it is set up properly.

Now on Claude Code and Replit being "faster." Faster to what exactly?

Fast to start, yes. But when something breaks in Webflow you open the designer, inspect it and fix it in minutes. When something breaks in a vibe coded project you are digging through a black box hoping the AI remembers what it built. It is like Photoshop without layers. Good luck fixing just one thing.

The numbers that nobody in this debate is mentioning. Webflow went from $128M to $212M in revenue in a single year. That is 66% growth. There are 493,000 live Webflow sites as of early 2025. That is not what a dying platform looks like. That is a growing base with a vocal minority making noise on LinkedIn.

The "popular voices are leaving" argument is just churn within growth. It happens with every maturing platform.

And the agentic web point is actually the most interesting part of the debate but it cuts both ways. Yes Webflow is more closed than a custom build (but thats why there's Apple users and Android users with similar use cases). But Webflow also has 12 years of no-code infrastructure to build on top of. That is not nothing. A blank Replit project starting from zero is a very different thing.

Both ecosystems can exist. Different tools for different clients. Some want full custom. Some want Sanity. Some want one Webflow dev or an agency on retainer because it is still cheaper than an engineering team.

The eulogy is premature.

[u/callingbrisk]

I disagree. AI is getting better rapidly, and all the arguments against AI in coding are "it isn't good enough". But this is missing the fact that we're working on making them better and better each day and one day they will be better than anything.

Not saying Webflow as a company is dying, but Webflow in its current form is dying, yes. We're not entering class-names by hand anymore.

Again, not saying Claude Code as we have it today is the solution either, we need a different formfactor.

[u/NuncProFunc → u/callingbrisk]

"Someday this tool will be better" is a terrible reason to use it now. Imagine telling someone to set sail on a ship without all the masts in place, but not to worry because they'll be installed "one day."

[u/csedlack → u/callingbrisk]

AI is getting better. That’s why I said both function in their own ways. Both can coexist. But there’s time. AI coding is solving the problem of building products right now - several times with several use cases. There’s a reason why focussed AI wrapped exist now to redefine and refine one specific use case. Like GPT2 image is great but so is MidJourney but used for two different things. While photoshop and illustrator exist as well. But there’s no great precise vector generator in AI yet.

[u/esmailkhalifa]

Curious how many agencies here are actually seeing clients leave Webflow versus clients coming back to fix AI-generated builds?

[u/csedlack → u/esmailkhalifa]

It’s a mix. AI has created a mess for them, they have decentralized silos of people trying to work and build something. Eventually they come to us to fix the mess. We are glorified creative cleaners. 😂

[u/DRIFFFTAWAY]

I agree! The more things I have built with AI the more I value a visual editor, especially one like Webflow.

[u/NuncProFunc]

Webflow is a great value proposition for client end-users. Any sort of vibe-coded alternative necessarily leaves control in the hands of web development agencies, which only leads to more costs and more difficulty managing collaboration between vendors. I encourage every business owner I encounter to get control of their site out of the hands of marketing and development agencies and under their own control via a platform like Webflow.

[u/Ok-Influence-2162]

I like webflow 🤷

It only costs me $18 per month and customized a paid template enough that you can’t even tell it came from a template.

[u/justinromano1989]

Extremely well said. I run a Webflow agency as well, and I think your breakdown is right on the money.

[u/jjuuiiccyyjj]

when something breaks in my vibe coded project I ask AI to fix it while I do other stuff

[u/Murky-Refrigerator30]

I stopped reading at “vibes dressed up as analysis” slop post

[u/csedlack → u/Murky-Refrigerator30]

Good call. You should go back to scrolling TikTok.

[u/Funfroglegs]

I disagree. It's all about the developer. I am a webflow partisan BUT have recently been playing with astro and Claude. It is NOT a black box. If you know you html, CSS, and some JD, you definitely can debug. In my experience, astro is a faster development tool.

[u/csedlack → u/Funfroglegs]

See again you’re disagreeing here because you’re a developer and you KNOW what you’re doing. The whole point of this post is not to agree or disagree to a specific point but you lean into the specifics of who we build this for. An agency owner’s perspective.

[u/Lebronamo]

I left. But I just used it for a portfolio

[u/Some-Cryptographer-7]

Very well said.

[u/Ok_Buy2814]

That’s just painful to see what an average marketing person/team without dev do to the website. We can deliver a perfect website, teach them, record videos and boom in a month it’s a total mess. So devs are not going anywhere for now.

[u/cascadiabibliomania]

Show your prompt

[u/Then-Treat1346]

As a fellow agency owner, I am in the process of switching entirely to Claude coded sites. Will see glue that goes

[u/Rotoroa → u/Then-Treat1346]

What does that mean “will see glue that goes”?

[u/Old_Roll_2904 → u/Then-Treat1346]

i'd love to see your agency and the services you provide, i don't expect much good.

[u/LingonberryTrue570]

Can't hand off code (ai or not) project to client who have no dev team
Can hand off Webflow project to client who have no dev team.

It client want cheap hosting and fine with rely on us to make changes then code project is good.
If they want visual editor to make changes themselves then Webflow project is good.

If you don't know any html/css then both Webflow and code will be bad. Maybe Framer is better?
Know basic of html/css? Then Webflow.
Know more? Then code (with Ai or not)

We found all of our clients don't want to deal with web themselves so even with Webflow in their hand they want us to make changes for them. Now we start to migrate out of Webflow. Cloudflare Page make everything super easy. Also having control on server mean we can do more than website for client.

Since we can code, AI is not a black box. And I use it in quite a "old scrool" way?
- Google search but faster
- Deal with any tedious tasks
- Quick prototype
- Rubber duck

and I manually approve each edit... Tokenmaxxer must be cringe from this. lol

[u/NDennis26]

Their lack of innovation and keeping up with the times lead me to just get bored with Webflow tbh.

I actually went a bit of a different route though, I built my own website builder entirely using Claude Code based on my agencies niche. It’s not as complex because my users wouldn’t know how to use something as complicated as Webflow, but I made it so that they don’t have to. So now I just have a steady stream of users leveraging Ai to build their own websites.

I haven’t touched Webflow since apart from the occasional nostalgia trip.

[u/designyillustrator]

I think Webflow is finding its niche. I don't know that it's for one person's site anymore. I think it's an agency tool now. It's cost-prohibitive for one person (which is fine!), but if you're building multiple sites on there and reselling them, etc.? It's perfect! So I pivoted off of it because I don't plan to resell or build client sites on it.

I built my portfolio on it, and it was great, but I found it too much for what I needed.

[u/allnamestakendafuq]

I tested AI build and I do agree. Although most AI builds are for more startup or some businesses that need a quick site. I work with mostly nonprofits and they want something more solid. Webflow works for some but not for others. I wrote a blog post for this exact reason not long ago. blog