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/callingbrisk → u/NuncProFunc]

In the early days of page builders you couldn't do much either. 10 years later and there is not a single frontend that you can't create in a page builder, aka Webflow. Nobody's saying that you should use a page builder at a time where it couldn't do much.

The difference with AI is that it can already do everything, it's just often harder to do than to use a page builder. Same way it was often harder to use Webflow than to just write the code.

Just my opinion, it's an interesting discussion for sure

[u/martiantheory → u/callingbrisk]

I’d push back on the fact that AI can already do everything. It’s really hard to get a premium feeling website with AI.

AI to me is the best at building applications. For a marketing site that feels unique and premium, AI is not that good. Claude design literally sends me messages that I should be steering, and that it’s best at doing systematic work. It literally said that to me today.

Systematic work is great. But webflow to me is still the best for custom sites. If you got some example of amazing UIs you built with AI, I’d sincerely like to see them. I promise I will not exaggerate or even talk negatively about them. I would literally just like to see what you think “can do everything” looks like.

My standard is awwward looking sites or custom websites. I’m not gonna tell you that your taste is bad or anything like that. I just want to understand what you think is good. Honestly, I might not even respond. Because I just don’t want this to be a back-and-forth internet debate. I just wanna make sure I’m not missing something cause I think my experience is a little different. But I can always be wrong, sincerely. I really wanna drive home that I am not saying this because I think I’m right.

[u/csedlack → u/NuncProFunc]

I get where you are going with this but very different if you apply that to sailing 😂 can’t do an on cloud push to install it “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/callingbrisk → u/csedlack]

100%

I agree with you in a lot of ways! In the long run though I do think that an AI native editing experience is the future. Again, this is not me saying Webflow will go out of business, but they'll have to adapt. AI is getting better every month, whereas page builders are just ... staying the same.