Framer, Webflow or Shopify: choosing a platform your team can run

Most platform debates are really about who will run the site after we leave. A developer will happily argue for Next.js. A designer will pick Framer. Neither of them is going to log in on a Tuesday afternoon to change the opening hours. Your team is.

So we start every platform decision with the people, not the features. We have launched sites on Framer, Webflow, Shopify, WordPress and Next.js with Sanity, and each one is the right answer for someone.

Start with three questions

1. Who publishes, and how often? A marketing team shipping landing pages every week needs something different from a firm adding a case study each quarter.
2. What does the site sell, if anything? Selling products online changes the answer almost immediately.
3. What has to connect to it? Booking engines, CRMs, inventory and product data all narrow the field.

Framer, for small teams who want to move quickly

Framer is the quickest route from design to a live site, and it is the platform our clients find easiest to edit. Pages are built visually, the CMS is simple, and hosting, security and speed are handled for you. It suits marketing sites, launches, studios and consultancies of up to around fifty pages.

Where it struggles: complex content models with many references, detailed user permissions, and anything that needs server-side logic. If your brief includes a members’ area, Framer is not the answer.

Webflow, for marketing teams with a real content model

Webflow sits between Framer’s simplicity and a developer platform. Its CMS handles richer relationships, such as authors, categories, locations and case studies that reference services, and its editor lets marketers work safely inside designed components. Localisation and role-based permissions are mature.

The cost is a steeper learning curve for whoever maintains the design system, and plan pricing that rises with CMS items and traffic. For a team of three to twenty marketers publishing every week, it is usually our recommendation.

Shopify, if you sell products

If the site sells physical products, we begin with Shopify and only move away from it with a good reason. Checkout, payments, tax, shipping, inventory and the app ecosystem are solved problems there, and your operations team will always find people who know it.

The theme layer is more flexible than its reputation. Most of the stores we launch use a custom Online Store 2.0 theme, with sections your team can rearrange without a developer. We go headless, with Shopify behind a Next.js front end, only when the brand needs drop pages, configurators or content that a theme cannot reasonably carry.

WordPress and Next.js, when the brief is unusual

WordPress remains a sensible choice for publishers with large archives, teams that already have WordPress skills, and sites that depend on a particular plugin with no equivalent elsewhere. We build it carefully: block themes, few plugins and a managed host.

Next.js with Sanity is our choice when the site needs custom logic: configurators, calculators, gated content, or data from several systems on the same page. It is the most capable option and the one that most needs a development partner after launch, so we only recommend it when a client has budget for ongoing care.

What we do not choose on

We do not choose on what is fashionable, or on which platform we most enjoy building with. We also try not to choose on monthly fees alone. The difference between plans is rarely more than a few hundred pounds a year, which is small next to the cost of a team that cannot update its own site and has to raise a ticket for every change.

Migration cost matters more. Moving platforms later means rebuilding templates, moving content and redirecting every URL, so it is worth paying a little more now for the platform that fits the next five years rather than the next five months.

The short version

• Fewer than fifty pages, one or two editors, launch in weeks: Framer.
• A content team publishing weekly with a structured CMS: Webflow.
• Selling products: Shopify, with a custom theme.
• A large archive or existing WordPress skills: WordPress.
• Custom logic, integrations or a configurator: Next.js and Sanity.

Whichever way it goes, we write the reasoning into the brief so that everyone can see why the choice was made. If the business changes in two years, that note makes the next decision a quick one.