Uncover Hidden Costs in Your CMS: Don’t Break Your 2025 Budget

We know your website is the first impression many users will have about your company. Some consider it a digital storefront or a greeting card. Regardless of how you see your website, building one that’s unique and fits with your company’s story is a challenging task that requires time, technical expertise, and money.

A complex website can run well over $100k+ and take hundreds of hours of development work to create from scratch, and that’s not considering the cost of upkeep, maintenance, design updates, SEO, and more.

Headless CMS content management systems and no-code/low-code website builders such as Webflow, Framer, and WordPress were created to eliminate or diminish that friction. And they’re a success; it’s estimated that over 60% of websites use some form of CMS. The cost for website builders is a fraction of a custom-built website from scratch, running at about $1,000 on average upfront costs.

However, to choose the right CMS for your business, you must consider other areas besides development, such as design and marketing, upkeep, scalability potential, features available for your company, and more possible additional costs. Suppose a builder is incredible for e-commerce, but your business doesn’t need 95% of those e-commerce features; it can’t be your best option.

In this blog post, we’ll compare the most prominent website builders, Webflow, WordPress, and Framer, to ensure you don’t fall into the trap of paying unnecessary additional costs while growing your business to its full potential.

Why choose a website builder

Website builders and low-code/no-code CMS are very popular because they allow companies that don’t have the resources of a tech giant to scale their efforts since the website can be built either on plugins and templates like WordPress or through drag-and-drop design-first interfaces like Framer.

So we’re on the same page in scale, one of the prominent success cases presented by Webflow shows how Jasper increased page-build speed by 3x by adopting their system.

However easy it is to create a website with a builder, you can’t simply do it because other companies are doing it. The decision has to factor in your particular needs for the website to perform its duties. And most importantly, it can’t break your budget.

To define which website builder best fits your needs, you have to consider the following:

• Ease of use
• Design freedom
• Development upkeep
• Marketing capabilities and performance
• CMS features
• Scalability
• Integrations and plug-ins
• Pricing
• Ongoing costs (servers, SSL, CDN, domain, etc.)

Let’s quickly go over your options, and then we’ll dive deeper into each aspect.

Webflow: The marriage between design and development

W3Tech estimates that Webflow's market share is 1.1%. While that may sound low at first glance, remember we have over a billion websites online. The platform has been getting increasingly better and growing in influence due to how well-spoken it is by developers and designers.

It offers excellent in-between, is easy enough for non-technical users to drive fast iteration, and has the necessary properties for developers with many native tools. Considering how they also have logos such as Jasper, Dropbox, Vice, and more, they’ve shown the potential and versatility of the tool. They’ve also added certifications for developers, so whenever you’re hiring someone for your team, you can certify that they have the knowledge to drive your vision to life.

Here are some of the most important strengths and possible points of friction for Webflow.

Strengths:

• Advanced design freedom: Webflow’s no-code interface lets you craft pixel-perfect designs without relying on developers. Its visual editor is ideal for creating unique, branded websites. In most other platforms, you’d need to pay an additional amount for plugins and integrations to get these functionalities.
• Robust CMS: Webflow is becoming a favorite of marketing teams since it’s fantastic at content-driven campaigns. Webflow’s CMS makes it easy to manage dynamic content—from blog posts to product catalogs.
• Integrated localization & eCommerce: Businesses targeting global markets or online retail benefit from Webflow’s built-in support for multilingual sites and custom eCommerce solutions. There was a time when Webflow didn’t offer multilingual localization, but they do now. It’s a great sign that they listen to users and solve their pains.

Challenges:

• Learning curve: As is true for most complex tools, despite its visual and easy-to-navigate nature, Webflow’s advanced features require time to master for teams new to no-code platforms. There are intricacies in how you must set up the sections of your website for faster iteration.  
• Collaboration costs: Webflow charges per user for workspaces. As your team grows, these costs and fees for enterprise-level features can add up. This can be a plus for small teams or very organized teams since you most likely don’t need everyone to have a seat. Make sure that seats, including members from marketing, product, and development teams, are included in your calculations.
• Hidden technical costs: Although hosting and updates are managed, scaling into higher-tier plans for additional CMS items, advanced localization, or eCommerce features can push your budget higher. However, that’s also true for most other solutions in the space, where the costs go up for hosting, better servers, and plugins or integrations, which may cause the impression that they’re cheaper since the price is distributed among other crucial systems.

Webflow is one of the top solutions for startups and scaleups because it allows for a simple understanding of costs and a lot of autonomy in building a brand identity that sets itself apart from competitors.

When paired with unlimited design services, Webflow becomes a strong solution for high-growth startups since it provides a modular way of growing your team and boosting your company’s speed in delivering content and projects.

The most significant advantage you get is achieving sophisticated, scalable designs while keeping hidden costs in check.

Framer: Prototype, launch, now

Framer is also a strong pick. Since its founding in 2014, the company has seen remarkable growth and user adoption, especially among designers and web designers. They appreciate how fast it is to prototype and create landing pages and MVPs to test out ideas and such.

So, one-person shops and startups consider Framer an excellent solution for building beautiful websites with modern animations more straightforwardly. Of course, this comes with limitations, such as integrations and limited capabilities on other fronts, but we’ll explore them below.

Strengths:

• Rapid prototyping: Framer is ideal for quickly creating landing pages, MVPs, and interactive prototypes. Its intuitive interface is designed for speed, letting you test ideas rapidly. Designers enjoy working with Framer due to its similarities to graphic design software.
• Stunning visuals: If there’s one place where Framer excels, it’s creating beautiful websites. The platform is renowned for its animations and modern components, which can help your brand stand out in competitive markets.

Challenges:

• Integration gaps: Framer lacks some native features and robust third-party integrations, often requiring external tools (like Gumroad) that introduce extra costs and complexity to implementing and tracking your business results. They’ve been working on building a more robust platform, like adding CMS and SEO capabilities.
• Hidden costs in transition and scalability ceiling: While initial costs are low, if your needs grow, you may face the hidden expense of migrating to a more robust platform (like Webflow) to meet scalability requirements, going for an enterprise account with different seat limits, multi-localization, and more. However, it’s important to note that companies like Perplexity have reported great success with Framer. ‍

Framer is a fantastic platform, especially if you have a team of designers. Framer’s ease of use and strong design capabilities make it perfect for testing concepts. However, its limitations may eventually require migrating to a more scalable or cheaper platform for businesses with long-term growth plans. While this is not the case for all businesses, it’s something to consider.

WordPress: Perfect for content operations

WordPress needs no introductions; it’s the most widespread among the options. It’s open-source, free, and has a gigantic community ecosystem, which makes it viable for companies to survive by simply creating plug-ins to extend its capabilities.

One of the central drawers of WordPress is that it’s free, more on that later, and anyone can set up their site as a WordPress website. It’s also almost a legacy company, so the name is already quite recognizable as the way to build a better web.

While WordPress is free, don’t be fooled into thinking that setting up a WordPress website that can perform well on Google and is visually appealing will be free, easy, and straightforward to do. Here are the main strengths and weaknesses of WordPress.

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Strengths:

• Flexibility: With thousands of plugins and themes, WordPress can be tailored to virtually any business need—especially for content-rich sites. Considering how many websites use WordPress, you’d be hard-pressed to find a content team that doesn’t know how to deal with WordPress.
• Ideal for blogs & content-driven sites: WordPress remains one of the top choices for websites that rely on frequent content updates, robust SEO, and extensive editorial workflows. This is due to the many plug-ins that WordPress offers. It can be tailored to revamp full websites.
• Vast community support: This is one of the main reasons WordPress is so well-regarded. Since you have a gigantic community, it’d be rare for you to run into a novel issue. Chances are that in the WordPress developers and experts ecosystem, you can find help and custom solutions whenever needed.

Challenges:

• Plugin dependency & maintenance: Essential functionalities (security, SEO, forms) often require third-party plugins. This dependency can lead to compatibility issues, increased security risks, and higher maintenance efforts. It’s a significant trade-off between flexibility and simplicity.
• Complex setup costs: Although WordPress itself is free, the hidden costs can be substantial:
  
  • Hosting: Quality hosting services range from $10 to several hundred dollars per month.
  • SSL certificates & CDN: Secure connections and fast load times often require additional investments (SSL: $10–$200/year; CDN: $20+/month, and more).
  • Premium Themes and Plugins: These can add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to your initial setup. Since you want your website to stand out from simple templates.
• Resource-intensive: Managing a WordPress site’s regular updates, backups, and security patches can be time-consuming and expensive without in-house technical expertise, especially if some incompatibility surfaces that breaks a part of your website or operation (such as SEO).

WordPress remains a powerful choice for content-driven businesses, but its technical demands and hidden costs can strain teams without dedicated resources. Also, migrating from and to WordPress can become a hassle if you don’t have a dedicated WordPress developer. The hidden costs must be carefully managed for those seeking a balance between flexibility and ease of maintenance.

Aspects to consider when choosing WordPress vs Webflow vs Framer

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Now that we clearly understand each platform's pros and cons, let’s see how they stack up versus each other in terms of performance, security, upkeep, scalability, and future-proofing.

Performance and speed

• Webflow: Webflow has clean code and is hosted on high-performance servers, ensuring fast load times even during traffic spikes. Its managed hosting means you don’t have to worry much about the technical overhead.
• Framer: Emphasizes smooth, interactive animations that delight users. So, as designs become more complex, performance can vary tremendously. You need to develop a testing protocol before moving on with new features.
• WordPress: Performance largely depends on the chosen theme, plugins, and hosting provider. A poorly optimized WordPress site can suffer from slow load times. Investing in premium hosting, caching solutions, and a robust CDN is essential—but these come at an extra cost.

Security and maintenance

• Webflow: Comes with built-in security features and automatic updates. Because the platform manages hosting and maintenance, the vulnerabilities and upkeep bandwidth risks are as low as they get.
• Framer: Offers security measures. While simplicity reduces some risk, users should still follow best practices to ensure their site remains secure.
• WordPress: Security is something to always keep in mind with WordPress. Relying on numerous plugins can introduce vulnerabilities if they aren’t regularly updated. In addition to the cost of premium security plugins (e.g., Sucuri), self-hosted WordPress sites require regular backups, monitoring, and updates—often translating into higher long-term maintenance costs.

Scalability

• Webflow: Scales effectively with business growth. Its feature set can expand as your needs increase, and its predictable, tiered pricing model helps you plan for the future. And also for the expansion of your team as you open new seats on the platform.
• Framer: Amazingly well-suited for small projects and experimentation due to its excellent prototyping. Its scalability features might require a platform change as your content and traffic grow since new costs can add up.
• WordPress: It offers tremendous scalability potential, but it often comes with significant additional resource needs. As your site grows, you may face increased costs for premium hosting, enhanced security, and custom development.

Future-proofing:

• Webflow: Regularly update with new features to keep up with modern web standards while ensuring that your site remains competitive in design and is easy for developers and designers to use.
• Framer: Focuses on current design trends while keeping pace with current standards for SEO and performance.
• WordPress: Relies on community-driven development. You’re in charge of managing and updating the system to stay current.

Hidden Costs and Resource Allocation

Initial costs:

• Webflow:
  
  • Subscription-Based Pricing: Predictable monthly fees based on the plan you choose.
  • Add-Ons: Costs for additional workspace seats and enterprise-grade features can increase as your team expands.
• Framer:
  
  • Low Entry Costs: Offers free and basic paid plans ideal for quick launches.
  • Cost Escalation: Additional integrations and feature upgrades can drive up costs if your needs grow.
• WordPress:
  
  • Free Core, But…: While the platform is open source, you must invest in quality hosting (ranging from $10 to several hundred dollars per month), premium themes, and plugins.
  • Technical Extras: Secure your site with SSL certificates (often $10–$200/year), use a reliable CDN (starting at around $20/month), and cover domain registration fees. These components can add up quickly, especially for high-traffic sites.

Maintenance costs:

• Webflow: Minimal effort is required as updates and hosting are managed. Your main expense is the subscription and potential add-ons as you scale.
• Framer: Generally low-maintenance, but reliance on external tools may require occasional updates or migrations.
• WordPress: Demands continuous updates, security patches, and technical support.

Scalability costs:

• Webflow: Its tiered pricing model is predictable, though high-growth needs (e.g., more CMS items or advanced eCommerce) may push you into higher-priced plans.
• Framer: Easily predictable costs for smaller projects, but you might face limitations that force a platform migration or upscaling your plan as your business expands.
• WordPress: While scalable, adding premium hosting, advanced caching, and more robust security measures will increase costs as your traffic and content volume grow.

Resource allocation:

• Webflow: Reduces the need for in-house technical expertise. The managed environment lets your team concentrate on core marketing activities.
• Framer: Ideal for design-focused teams with minimal technical resources—but may require additional investment if you scale.
• WordPress: Often necessitates dedicated technical staff or external developers to handle ongoing maintenance and customization.

With this, we can finally put the discussion on which CMS to choose to rest. The reality is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Choosing the right website builder isn’t merely about selecting the most popular tool—it’s about aligning your digital platform with your unique business needs, growth objectives, and resource capabilities. By carefully evaluating factors such as ease of use, design freedom, ongoing maintenance, performance, security, scalability, and hidden costs (including technical expenses like servers, SSL, CDN, and domain fees), you can make an informed decision that supports your long-term strategy.

For many modern businesses, scale-ups, and startups especially, the combination of Webflow’s advanced capabilities with the support of unlimited design services offers a compelling solution.

It can empower your team to focus on what matters—growing your brand and driving revenue—without going too deep with technical complexities and hidden costs since most of the pricing is upfront with subscription fees.

Why Webflow + Awesomic is the perfect match for you

When you combine Webflow’s robust platform with a dedicated partner such as Awesomic, you unlock benefits that directly address the challenges and hidden costs outlined above. You don’t need the tool expertise since that’ll be offered through Awesomic’s top-quality, vetted talent.

Less than 0.6% of people applying to Awesomic get to work with a client due to our rigorous vetting process. And no one better to understand your pains than founders who went through the same troubles and created the solution.

With Awesomic, you get matched with talent in as few as 24 hours, and there are no hidden fees. Talents you get matched to are industry experts, so they can hit the ground running. You get updates every business day at least once, and they can also guide you through the process. Forget endless delays, radio silence, and shoddy quality freelance work forever.

Join companies like Toothy (YC W’25) and the recently acquired Denario, which trusted Awesomic with their creative and technological needs to finish crucial business projects. Book a demo today, and get started on your project tomorrow. Take your website to the next level with Awesomic + Webflow.