Webflow comes up in nearly every conversation we have about rebuilding a site, usually because someone's designer recommended it. It's a good tool. It's also changed a lot this year, and most of the advice you'll find online is now out of date. Here's the honest 2026 picture.
What Webflow actually is
It's a visual builder that sits between Squarespace and writing code yourself. You design in the browser, dragging boxes and setting styles, and it produces real HTML and CSS rather than a locked-in template. Webflow then hosts it for you.
The catch that surprises people: it isn't a beginner tool. It expects you to understand how CSS layout works, the box model, flexbox, grid. If you've never met those, Webflow will feel like being handed the controls of a plane. If you have, it's a lovely way to work.
The prices changed in May 2026, and it matters
If you've read a Webflow comparison written before this summer, throw it out. In May 2026 Webflow scrapped the old Basic, CMS and Business lineup and merged CMS and Business into a single Premium plan.
What that leaves, per site, billed annually (Webflow prices in US dollars, so the euro figure moves with the exchange rate, and VAT is added at checkout unless you give them a valid Irish VAT number):
- Starter, free, but it publishes to a webflow.io address, so it isn't a real website
- Basic, $15 a month annually, or $25 month to month
- Premium, $25 a month annually, or $39 month to month
- Team, $2,500 a month, annual contract
Here's the bit worth knowing before you budget: Basic cannot host a blog. That isn't us being sniffy, it's Webflow's own documentation, which says Basic plans are for sites that don't use any CMS features. So if you want a website with a blog on it, the real entry price is Premium at $300 a year, not $180.
Then there are the extras that arrive later. Webflow's own bandwidth allowance on Premium is 50GB, which is half what the old Business plan gave, and more costs from $20 a month on top. Multiple languages are charged per language per month, from $9 each. AI credits are metered now too, and those limits started being enforced in June.
What Webflow is good at
We'd recommend it in the right situation, and we mean that:
- The output is clean. Semantic markup, sensible page weight, and proper controls for page titles, descriptions, canonical tags and sitemaps without hunting for a plugin.
- Nothing to maintain. No plugin updates, no security patching, no 2am conflicts. Webflow's own status page has been running at about 99.95% uptime.
- Design freedom. You aren't fighting a theme's opinions about what your homepage should look like.
- Clients can edit words without breaking the design. Free commenting seats, and cheap limited-edit seats, are a real advantage over handing someone the keys to WordPress.
- The blog side got much more generous in May: up to 20,000 CMS items on Premium, where it used to cap out at 2,000.
The part that should decide it for you
Webflow lets you export your code. It sounds like the answer to lock-in. Read what's actually excluded, in their words:
- your CMS content, so your entire blog
- your ecommerce content, so your entire shop
- form submission handling
- site search
- everything in any language other than your main one
You can leave Webflow with your design. You cannot leave with your working website. Everything dynamic has to be rebuilt somewhere else. And export needs a paid workspace plan on top of your site plan, so it isn't included in the price you thought you were paying.
That's the single most important sentence in this article, and it's the question we'd ask before anything else: in three years, if you want to move, what exactly are you carrying out the door?
Two other things worth knowing
Webflow has been removing features, not adding them. Logic, its built-in automation tool, was switched off in June 2025. User Accounts, for memberships and gated content, went in January 2026. The official answer in both cases is to buy a third-party service instead, which means your website now depends on someone else's subscription too. Agencies reselling Webflow under their own branding are losing that option as well.
It's not the right home for a shop, particularly not an Irish one. Webflow supports two payment gateways where Shopify supports hundreds, charges a 2% transaction fee on its entry ecommerce plan, and its automatic tax handling has a poor reputation outside the US. If you're selling into the EU and dealing with VAT OSS, that's a real problem rather than a niggle. Our Shopify vs WooCommerce piece is the better read if selling is the point.
It's also worth noting Webflow is deliberately moving upmarket. There were layoffs in May 2026, the new features are landing on the enterprise tiers first, and there's now a $2,500 a month plan. That's a company aiming at bigger customers than most Irish small businesses.
So, is it worth it in 2026?
Honestly, yes, in three situations:
- You're a designer, or you have one, and you want visual control without a developer for every change.
- Your site is content and marketing, not transactions.
- You're happy to stay. If leaving isn't on your mind, lock-in isn't a cost.
And no in three others:
- You want to own the thing you paid for, outright, with no monthly dependency.
- You're selling online, especially across the EU.
- You're running a lot of sites. Webflow charges per site, so ten client sites is $3,000 a year in plans alone, before workspaces or seats. That cost scales in a straight line, which is why we don't build our client work on it.
For what it's worth, we build with plain HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, hosted wherever the client likes, for about the price of a domain. Different trade-off: more skill needed up front, nothing owed monthly, and the whole thing is yours. Neither approach is the right one for everybody, and we'd tell you if Webflow suited you better.
Not sure which way to go? Have a chat, we've no horse in this race, or get a sense of the numbers from our estimator.
Prices checked September 2026. Webflow changes them, so check webflow.com/pricing before you commit.