Most platform debates are really about who’ll run the site after the studio leaves. A developer will happily argue for Next.js. A designer will reach for Framer. Neither of them is going to log in on a Tuesday afternoon to update your opening hours. Your team is.
So we start every platform decision with the people, not the features. Between us, our team has built sites on Framer, Webflow, Shopify, WordPress and Next.js, and each one is the right answer for someone.
Start with three questions
Who publishes, and how often? A marketing team shipping landing pages every week needs something very different from a firm adding one case study a quarter.
What does the site sell, if anything? Selling products online changes the answer almost immediately.
What has to connect to it? CRMs, booking systems, inventory and product data all narrow the field quickly.
Framer, for small teams who want to move fast
Framer is the quickest route from design to a live site, and it’s the platform clients usually 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, product launches, studios and consultancies of up to around fifty pages.
Where it’s less of a fit: complex content models with lots of references between items, detailed user permissions, and anything that needs custom logic on a server. If your brief includes a members’ area, Framer probably isn’t the answer.
Webflow, for marketing teams with a real content model
Webflow sits between Framer’s simplicity and a full developer platform. Its CMS handles richer relationships, like authors, categories, locations and case studies linked to services, and its editor lets marketers work safely inside designed components. Localization and role-based permissions are mature.
The trade-off is a steeper learning curve for whoever maintains the design system, and plan pricing that climbs with CMS items and traffic. For a team of three to twenty marketers publishing every week, it’s usually our recommendation.
Shopify, if you sell products
If the site sells physical products, Shopify is the starting point, and you need a good reason to move away from it. Checkout, payments, sales tax, shipping, inventory and the app ecosystem are solved problems there, and your operations team will always be able to find people who know it.
Its theme layer is more flexible than its reputation suggests. A well-built custom theme gives your team sections they can rearrange without a developer. Going headless, with Shopify running behind a custom front end, only makes sense when the brand needs product drops, configurators or content a theme can’t reasonably carry.
Pick the platform your newest marketing hire can learn in an afternoon. That’s the one your site will still be running on in three years.
WordPress and custom code, when the brief is unusual
WordPress is still a sensible choice for publishers with large archives, teams that already know it well, and sites that rely on a specific plugin with no equivalent elsewhere. Built carefully, with a modern theme, few plugins and a managed host, it holds up well.
A custom build, typically Next.js with a headless CMS and hosting on AWS, is the choice when the site needs real logic: configurators, calculators, gated content, or data from several systems on the same page. It’s the most capable option and the one that most needs a development partner after launch, so we only recommend it when there’s budget for ongoing care.
What about sites built with AI tools?
More teams now arrive with a site they built themselves in an AI tool. Sometimes that’s a perfectly good foundation. The question isn’t which tool made it but whether it can be maintained, secured, hosted properly and connected to the rest of the business. We answer that with a technical audit before recommending whether to keep it, harden it or rebuild on one of the platforms above.
What we don’t choose on
We don’t choose on what’s 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 dollars a year, which is small next to the cost of a team that can’t update its own site and has to raise a ticket for every change.
Migration cost matters more. Switching platforms later means rebuilding templates, moving content and redirecting every URL. It’s worth paying a little more now for the platform that fits the next five years, not 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: a custom build on Next.js and AWS.
A site you built with AI tools: start with an audit before deciding.
Whichever way it goes, we write the reasoning into the brief, so everyone can see why the choice was made. If the business changes in two years, that note makes the next decision a quick one.
