With Webflow Conf in Boston this week, Webflow has an opportunity to do more than stay in the running as the website platform of the future. It has a chance to jump back out in front.
Framer and other tools have been closing the gap for years, particularly when it comes to the core website-building experience. At the same time, Webflow has been expanding its ambitions beyond the builder. Its investments in products like Analyze and Optimize make it clear that Webflow want to own the marketing and growth platform space.
That is a compelling direction, but it may have come with a tradeoff. While Webflow has built out a larger marketing ecosystem, Framer appears to have invested more heavily in advancing the builder itself.
AI is now forcing those two paths back together.
If Webflow can combine a more open, AI-native building experience with its marketing and growth capabilities it has been developing, the conversation will move in the direction they want it—from how you build to how you grow. Tempo has never been a one-platform shop, so we’re excited to see what Webflow has in store and how the competition shakes out.
In a recent post, Webflow acknowledged a fundamental limitation in its platform: the abstraction that makes visual building possible can also get in the way of developers and emerging AI workflows.
Visual building remains one of Webflow’s greatest strengths. It is fast, clear and effective. But the distance between the visual canvas and the underlying code has kept Webflow separated from more conventional development workflows.
That approach made more sense when raw code was primarily the domain of developers. Now AI agents can read, write and modify code fluently. A layer originally designed to make code more accessible can become a wall that limits what people—and agents—can build.
That is a significant thing for a company to acknowledge about its own product. A company willing to identify a foundational limitation is also one we’re excited to see attempt to fix it.
Webflow’s recent investments outside the builder are important to this conversation.
Analyze and Optimize signal that Webflow doesn’t simply want to help teams publish websites. It wants to help marketers understand how those websites perform, experiment with different experiences and improve business results.
Framer has moved in this direction to a degree, but it still feels more firmly positioned as a website builder. That focus may have helped it make faster progress in the builder experience.
Webflow’s opportunity is to bring these strengths together: a modern, flexible builder paired with the analytics, optimization and governance tools needed to operate a serious marketing platform.
That combination could be much more meaningful than winning a feature-by-feature contest with Framer.
If Webflow follows through on getting closer to the source, we hope it begins moving from a closed builder with an export button toward something more like a visual code editor.
Ideally, the experience on the canvas would represent the actual codebase—not simply a translation layer inside a proprietary platform. And it would work across web stacks rather than requiring every project to live entirely inside the Webflow ecosystem.
Picture a single project where:
That is the version of Webflow worth getting excited about: not simply a platform you choose instead of WordPress, Shopify or a custom stack, but a tool you can use to build sites, products and digital experiences across them.
Layered on top of that power, we would also love to see something genuinely simple: a client-facing editing experience that doesn’t feel like handing a marketing team the keys to an exhaustive website builder.
Give developers and designers the complete environment. Give marketing teams a focused, protected layer that lets them update content, assemble approved components and launch new pages without touching anything that could compromise the site.
That is the pitch we want to hear at this conference. Not just, “Come build on our platform,” but something closer to:
“Use our platform to build anything, with anyone, and take it anywhere.”
All of that is the future.
In the meantime, we’re still shipping client work on the Webflow that exists today—and that Webflow has real, everyday friction that has nothing to do with a future source-of-truth architecture.
We would love to see as much energy go into refining current workflows as into articulating the larger vision. Marketing-team editing, collaboration, quality-of-life improvements and the reliability of everyday production work still matter.
A grand new architecture won’t mean much to a client who simply needs their website to do what it is supposed to do this week.
These are a few of the sessions on our list:
We’re excited about what the future could hold for Webflow. Its diagnosis feels more honest and reflective than the usual company messaging, and the future it is describing looks a lot like the platform we’ve wanted for years.
Now we want to see Webflow connect that future to the investments it has already made in analytics, experimentation and growth—and give the unglamorous, everyday parts of the platform some attention too.
Tempo will be on the ground for all three days. Come find us. We have strong opinions, and we’re always up for talking shop over even stronger drinks.
