Framer

Framer is a website builder with a design tool's interface: you lay a page out on a canvas the way you would in Figma, and Framer publishes it as a real, hosted, responsive site with its own CDN. It started life as a prototyping tool, and the interaction model it kept from that era is why animation and scroll effects are far less painful here than in most builders. The workflow is direct. You design on the canvas with layout primitives — stacks, grids and breakpoints — that produce responsive output rather than fixed positions. Components with variants keep a design system consistent across pages. A CMS holds structured collections for blogs, case studies or job listings, with collection pages generated from a template. Effects, scroll transitions and page transitions are built in rather than hand-coded. When the built-in components run out, you can drop in your own React code components, which is the escape hatch that keeps it from being a closed system. SEO basics, localisation, forms and analytics are covered, and there is a large marketplace of templates. Pricing is freemium and splits between sites and seats, which is the part people miss when budgeting. Site plans: Free is $0 with 500 credits to try, Basic is $10 per month, Pro is $30 per month, and Enterprise is custom. On top of that, additional editor seats are $20 per month each, content-only editors are $10 each, and viewers are free. A solo founder pays the site plan; a marketing team of four pays the site plan plus seats. The honest limitations: a Framer site is hosted by Framer, so you are choosing a platform rather than exporting code to run anywhere, and heavily animated pages need discipline to keep Core Web Vitals healthy on mobile. Webflow is the direct comparison and the more powerful one — deeper CMS, more granular control over the underlying markup and CSS, steeper learning curve, and a pricing model that separates site plans from workspace seats in its own way. Squarespace and Wix are simpler and cheaper for a brochure site and far more limited on interaction. Designing in Figma and handing off to a developer produces the most control and costs the most time. Next.js on Vercel is the answer when the marketing site has to share a codebase with the product. Choose Framer when a designer needs to ship and maintain a marketing site without a developer in the loop.