A founder's guide to Webflow vs. Storyblok

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) is a big deal. It's not just a technical choice - it's a bet on how your business will grow and compete. The easiest way to think about it is this: are you renting a furnished apartment or building your own house?

Webflow is the beautiful, convenient apartment. You can move in tomorrow, everything just works, and it looks great from day one. It gets rid of the hassle of a complicated build, making it incredibly fast to get a slick website live.

Storyblok, a headless CMS, is different. It gives you the blueprint and materials to build a custom house. You'll need more effort from your dev team upfront to lay the foundation. But in the end, you get a valuable asset that you completely own and control, built exactly how you want it.

This isn't just a feature list. It's a guide to the long-term effects of your choice, from team workflow and hidden costs to future-proofing and the pain of being locked into one vendor. As an agency that builds high-performance Next.js websites, we don't just finish projects, but build valuable, lasting assets for our clients. This article will show you the real trade-offs to help you decide which path fits your ambition.

How your team will actually build the website

In a modern product team, speed comes from working in parallel. Designers work on user experiences in Figma while developers build UI components and backend logic at the same time. With a headless CMS like Storyblok, these two streams merge nicely. Developers turn the final Figma designs into a library of reusable code components that content managers then use to build pages. Everyone works at the same time, in the tools they're best at.

The Webflow process is sequential. It adds a new, specialized role between design and development: the "Webflow Developer". This person's main job isn't writing code in a standard environment, but clicking and dragging to copy a Figma design into Webflow's visual builder.

This creates two big problems for a business. First, it's a linear step that can slow the whole project down. Second, only one person can really build in the Webflow Designer at a time. For small projects, that's fine. But for complex sites, it creates a bottleneck that a modern, parallel workflow avoids.

Owning your code vs. renting platform skills

To a business leader, "developer experience" isn't just a perk. It's a direct signal of how well your company can innovate and the quality of your final digital product.

With a setup like Storyblok and Next.js, your development team uses the same industry-standard tools that power the world's most advanced software. Your website's code lives in Git, where it can be automatically tested, peer-reviewed, and securely managed. The skills your developers use are valued across the tech industry. You're building a high-quality, maintainable asset that your company truly owns.

Webflow development is a platform-specific skill. All the technical work happens inside Webflow's proprietary visual tool. It's a great tool for building websites, but it means your team isn't writing code in a normal way. They are mastering one platform. You don't own your codebase in the same way. You're renting access to an ecosystem, and your ability to customize is limited by its rules.

How your marketing team will manage content

Webflow is famous for its powerful visual editor. It gives you true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) control, letting marketers design pages with pixel-perfect freedom. For years, this made it seem like the only user-friendly option.

That's not true anymore.

Modern headless CMSs like Storyblok have caught up. They now offer great real-time visual editors and live previews. The difference today isn't about ease of use - it's about the philosophy behind it.

Storyblok visual editing

Webflow "build" mode

• Webflow gives you freedom to create. A marketer can drag anything anywhere. This is great for one-off pages but can lead to messy, inconsistent designs if not handled by an expert.
• Storyblok gives you freedom from error. Developers create a library of on-brand, reusable components. Marketers then build pages with these blocks, confident that they can't break the design system.

Think about updating a hero banner. In Webflow, if that banner is on ten different landing pages, your team might have to find and manually update it ten times. In Storyblok, you update the single "Hero Component", and it instantly changes everywhere. It’s the efficiency of structured power over absolute freedom.

The real cost of starting vs. the true cost of scaling

To figure out the total cost, you have to look way beyond the sticker price. The way these platforms charge can get complicated.

Webflow's three-part pricing can be confusing. As a business owner, you pay for three separate things for one website:

• Workspace Plans: A per-seat, per-month fee for each team member (like a marketer or designer). This can be anywhere from $19 to $49+ per user.
• A Site Plan: A separate monthly fee just to publish your website to a custom domain.
• Add-ons: Important features for growth, like Localization for multiple languages and Optimize for A/B testing, are now separate, paid services.

For a small team of three people managing one website, you're paying for three Workspace seats plus one Site Plan. This can easily top $1,200 a year before you add a second language or run a single A/B test. As your team grows, these per-seat costs grow right along with your headcount.

Storyblok's costs scale differently. Its pricing is mainly based on team size, and one subscription can run your main website, a future mobile app, and other projects without extra fees. The main extra costs are the upfront developer time for the custom frontend build and separate hosting fees from platforms like Vercel or Netlify, which usually scale with your actual traffic.

This points to the key financial difference:

• With Webflow, costs go up with your team size, and key growth features like internationalization and A/B testing cost extra.
• With Storyblok, costs also scale with your team, but the pricing is more predictable and inclusive for businesses planning to grow across multiple channels.

Scenario 1: The solo founder with a simple website

For one person with a one-language website, the math is simple.

Verdict: Webflow is way cheaper. For a solo founder, Webflow's low entry price is the obvious winner. Storyblok's base plan is built for teams, making it overkill here.

Scenario 2: The growing business with a small team

Now, let's say your team grows to 3 people who all need to access the CMS for a single-language site.

Verdict: The cost is now about the same. This is the crossover point. Webflow's required per-seat fees bring its price right up to Storyblok's team plan, which gives you 5 seats from the start.

Scenario 3: The business that needs to go global

This is where the pricing models really split apart, revealing a key detail in Webflow's pricing. If your business needs four or more languages, you're forced into Webflow's pricey "Advanced" localization tier at $35 per locale.

Let's compare a 5-person team managing a site in six languages.

Verdict: Storyblok is almost $2,000 cheaper per year. The moment you need more than three languages, Webflow's "Language Cost Cliff" makes it a much more expensive option.

The honest truth about cost

• Webflow is the undeniable budget champ for solo founders and businesses that will only ever need 1-3 languages. Its all-in-one package provides simplicity and value.
• Storyblok offers much better value as your team and global ambitions grow. The tipping point is four languages. At this stage, Storyblok's straightforward and cheaper pricing per language makes it the clear financial choice, often saving thousands of dollars a year.

The myth of a clean migration

No one picks a platform planning to leave it, but smart businesses prepare for anything. This is where the "renting vs. owning" idea really matters, exposing the painful truth of vendor lock-in.

On the surface, Webflow seems to give you an escape hatch. It has an "export" feature for your site's code and its CMS data, which can create a false sense of security. But using this feature isn't a simple migration.

When you export from Webflow:

• Your CMS data comes out as flat CSV files. All the rich relationships in your data are broken. Multi-reference fields are lost, rich text becomes plain, and all image and asset URLs point back to Webflow's servers-they'll stop working the moment you cancel your plan.
• Your site's code exports as a static HTML/CSS snapshot. All the dynamic parts that make your site work-forms, user logins, e-commerce, and CMS connections-are gone.

The result isn't a portable website. It's a box of broken parts that requires a developer to manually re-host every image and rebuild every feature from scratch. As one developer famously put it, "It's not a migration. It's a complete rebuild from scratch".

With Storyblok, it's a totally different story because you already own all the pieces. Your content is stored as structured JSON that you can export anytime. Your frontend code is already your property, managed in your own Git repository. Leaving Storyblok would mean pointing your existing frontend to a new API. It's still a big engineering task, but you're not starting from zero. You get to keep your house and just change where the utilities come from. You aren't being evicted from a rental only to find out the fixtures you thought you owned were actually part of the building.

The predictable story of outgrowing your platform

A growing business rarely moves in a straight line, and its tech needs often follow a similar path. We see a familiar story play out over and over with companies that come to us for help.

The promising start

It starts with a great product and a smart marketing team. Their top priority is getting a beautiful website live as fast as possible. They choose Webflow, and for the first year or two, it’s perfect. The marketing team is happy, the designer’s vision comes to life, and the business gets a professional online presence that drives early growth.

The growing pains

But then, success brings new challenges. They decide to launch a native mobile app and realize their valuable content is locked inside the website. They want to expand into Europe and discover that managing six languages will be a logistical and financial mess. They need to build a custom integration with their inventory system, but their developers are stuck inside a closed ecosystem.

The strategic shift

The tool that was once a speedboat now feels like an anchor. It's holding them back from their strategic goals. This story isn't a failure. It's the natural result of a business's ambition outgrowing the platform it started on. It's the moment the convenience of a rental is overshadowed by the need for a custom-built house. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. It's the turning point where many companies ask us to help them migrate from Webflow to Storyblok, turning a growing pain into a strategic advantage.

Betting on a vendor vs. the entire web

Web technology moves at an incredible speed. Next.js, the main framework for building high-performance websites today, didn't even exist a decade ago. New ideas like edge computing and AI-driven optimizations are always popping up.

This constant change raises a big question: is your CMS built to adapt, or is it a snapshot of today's tech? Your choice between Webflow and Storyblok isn't just a bet on a platform. It's a bet on how you'll innovate in the future.

When you choose Webflow, you're betting on their product team. Your ability to use the next big thing in web performance depends entirely on their roadmap. You have to wait for them to build it and add it to their closed system. Your speed is tied to their corporate priorities.

When you choose Storyblok, you're betting on the entire open-source web community. The moment a new, faster framework appears, your developers can start using it. You have the freedom to experiment and adopt new advantages right away, without waiting for your CMS provider to catch up.

The market is already making its bet. The headless CMS market is expected to grow over 400% by 2031 as companies demand more flexible solutions. Choosing a headless architecture means you're aligning with the momentum of the whole web industry, not just the roadmap of one company.

Our honest recommendation

As a Next.js agency, we design digital experiences for where our clients are going, not just where they are today. The choice between these platforms isn't about "good" or "bad" - it's about what fits.

Webflow is an excellent tool for a specific job. If you just need a beautiful marketing website, launched next week, with no plans for multiple channels, complex integrations, or more than a few languages, it's a smart and efficient choice. It puts speed first.

But for businesses that want a competitive edge through technical quality and long-term flexibility, a headless architecture is the clear strategic choice. It's the foundation for companies that see their content as a core business asset and their digital presence as more than just a website. It puts ownership and scalability first.

Our value to clients comes from building these scalable, high-performance, future-proof digital assets. For that mission, the combination of Storyblok + Next.js is our go-to solution. It ensures that the platform you choose today won't become the bottleneck that limits your growth tomorrow. It's the difference between building for a single project and engineering for the future of your business.