Webflow vs Showit: Comprehensive comparison guide for 2024

Final verdict

Webflow and Showit both offer unique strengths, catering to different user needs and preferences.

• 
  Webflow (Overall Grade: 7.9/10)
  
  is a powerful platform designed for professional designers and developers. It excels in providing advanced design functionalities, a flexible CMS, and top-tier hosting services. Webflow’s robust ecommerce features, comprehensive marketing tools, and superior website speed optimization make it a strong choice for users seeking a highly customizable and scalable solution. However, its steeper learning curve may be challenging for beginners.
• 
  Showit (Overall Grade: 6.4/10)
  
  is tailored for creative professionals such as photographers, designers, and bloggers. It offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a unique dual canvas design for mobile and desktop views. Showit integrates seamlessly with WordPress for blogging, making it ideal for users who prioritize design flexibility and content presentation. While it lacks the comprehensive ecommerce capabilities of Webflow, Showit provides basic ecommerce functions through integrations with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce.

Best for ecommerce

Verdict

: Webflow is a more robust choice for ecommerce, offering extensive features and customization options, while Showit is better suited for visually oriented websites with basic ecommerce needs.

• 
  Webflow
  
  : Webflow excels in ecommerce with its comprehensive features, including checkout and payment processing with Stripe and PayPal, marketing tools, and tax and shipping calculations. It offers a range of ecommerce themes and templates, extensive product page customization, and flexible payment processing. With a score of 8.5, Webflow is ideal for businesses looking for a powerful and customizable ecommerce platform.
• 
  Showit
  
  : Showit focuses on design flexibility and creative freedom, making it perfect for visually oriented websites. It offers basic ecommerce functions through integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce but lacks the comprehensive ecommerce features of Webflow. With a score of 4.8, Showit is suitable for users who prioritize aesthetics and content presentation over robust online sales functionalities.

Best for informational & business websites

Verdict

: When it comes to creating informational and business websites, both Webflow and Showit offer robust solutions, but Showit edges out slightly with a score of 8.7 compared to Webflow’s 8.6. Showit is particularly well-suited for creative professionals who need a high degree of customization and control over their website’s appearance on different devices. Webflow, on the other hand, is ideal for professional designers looking for powerful design tools and a flexible CMS.

• 
  Webflow
  
  : Webflow is a comprehensive platform designed for professional designers, offering powerful design tools and a flexible CMS. It allows users to build and launch responsive, cleanly-coded websites without extensive coding knowledge. Webflow’s robust design experience includes over 1000 pre-built templates and a visual drag-and-drop editor for real-time adjustments. While it has a steeper learning curve, it provides extensive learning resources and top-tier hosting services, making it a strong choice for creating custom, responsive websites.
• 
  Showit
  
  : Showit is a drag-and-drop website builder tailored for creative professionals such as photographers, designers, and bloggers. It offers a unique dual canvas interface for independent design of mobile and desktop views, providing high customization and control. Showit integrates seamlessly with WordPress for blogging, making it a popular choice for users who want design flexibility with powerful blogging capabilities. Its user-friendly interface and extensive template library make it ideal for those looking to establish a unique online presence without needing to write code.

Detailed comparison

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Winner: Webflow.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers more creative control and a wide array of design features, Webflow is the preferred choice.

Webflow delivers a robust design experience with a diverse range of template and customization options. Boasting over 1000 pre-built templates covering various industries and website types, including free and premium options, Webflow ensures a constantly evolving library for users. Templates are categorized for easy browsing, considering industry, website type, style, and features. The design customization features include a visual drag-and-drop editor for real-time adjustments, fine-grained control over every aspect of the design, and the ability to inject custom code for advanced users seeking additional personalization and unique functionalities.

Webflow Themes

Compared to Webflow, Showit offers a wide variety of templates and designs, catering to diverse aesthetic preferences and business needs. Users can choose from an extensive collection that ranges from minimalist and sleek to bold and artistic, ensuring there’s something for every brand identity. The platform is known for its flexibility and user-friendly interface, allowing for easy customization of templates. With a constantly updating library, Showit ensures that users have access to the latest trends in web design, making it a popular choice for creatives and entrepreneurs looking to establish a unique online presence.

Showit Themes

🏆 Winner: Showit

. With a score of 8.6, Showit is designed to be highly user-friendly, offering a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to create custom websites without needing any coding knowledge. Webflow, scoring 7.5, is user-friendly for experienced designers and developers, but beginners may find it challenging due to a steeper learning curve.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Webflow

. Both platforms offer solid learning resources, but Webflow provides a more comprehensive set, including Webflow University, a YouTube Channel, and a thriving community across multiple platforms. Showit also offers a range of resources, including a training course and a learning hub with videos, but its community is smaller.

When it comes to ecommerce, Webflow and Showit cater to different needs. Webflow is a robust platform for creating online stores, offering comprehensive ecommerce features such as easy store creation without coding, extensive customization options, product management with variations, inventory tracking, integration with major payment gateways, automated shipping calculations, tax configuration, and marketing tools like abandoned cart recovery and email marketing.

Webflow ecommerce features:

• Checkout and Payment Processing with Stripe, PayPal, etc.
• Marketing and Promotions
• Tax and Shipping calculations

Showit ecommerce features:

• Shopify and WooCommerce integration

Ecommerce themes & templates

Webflow offers a diverse range of ecommerce themes and templates designed to cater to various types of online stores, from fashion and technology to artisan crafts and children’s products. Each template comes equipped with built-in ecommerce functionality, allowing you to easily add products and manage your store without the need for coding. On the contrary, Showit does not have any ecommerce specific templates.

Product page customization

Webflow offers extensive customization options for eCommerce product pages, allowing users to design and personalize their pages without coding. It provides tutorials for creating product pages from scratch, offers responsive templates for various devices, and allows users to add custom code and dynamic content using Webflow’s CMS for maximum customization flexibility. Showit, on the other hand, has very basic ecommerce capabilities, primarily through its integration with WooCommerce and Shopify.

Payment processing

Webflow provides a flexible and secure platform for payment processing and ecommerce through integrations with leading payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal. This allows users to accept a wide range of payments, including credit card transactions directly from their websites. Given the versatility of Stripe and PayPal, businesses can manage online sales efficiently, and these integrations likely support various transaction types, potentially including POS transactions for physical sales environments.

Showit supports e-commerce by allowing integration with third-party platforms like Shopify Lite, ThriveCart, WooCommerce, and Podia, rather than offering direct payment processing or POS capabilities. Users can add e-commerce functionalities to their Showit sites using embed codes for “Buy Buttons” or similar features from these platforms. The choice of platform depends on the user’s specific needs, including product type, store size, and budget, as each platform has its own pricing and transaction fee structures. Additionally, the platform supports integration of PayPal pay button, allowing users to pay directly through their PayPal account.

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Winner: Webflow

. With a score of 9.0, Webflow’s editor is praised for its intuitive visual interface that simplifies the process of designing and editing responsive websites without requiring deep technical knowledge. It offers a perfect blend of ease of use for beginners and the flexibility for more advanced users, enabling significant cost savings by allowing users to customize and manage their sites without hiring professionals.

Showit’s editor, scoring 8.0, is designed for creating custom, responsive websites with a focus on ease of use, especially for photographers and creative professionals. It allows users to design their website visually with a drag-and-drop interface, eliminating the need for coding knowledge. Users can create highly customized pages by adjusting layouts, fonts, and colors, and can also incorporate multimedia elements like videos and images directly into their designs.

Mobile editor/app

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Winner: Webflow

. Both Webflow and Showit do not have an official mobile editor app. However, Webflow has a third-party app called EditFlow, created by a community member for Webflow users, which is currently only available for iOS. On the other hand, Showit does not have a dedicated mobile editor app, and it’s not possible to edit a Showit website using a mobile browser version. Therefore, Webflow is the winner in this category due to the availability of a third-party mobile editing app.

Overall Result

:

Showit Wins

. Showit scores 8.3 in product testing options, outperforming Webflow which scores 6.3. Showit offers a 14-day free trial during which all premium features can be tested. Additionally, it provides a 30-day money-back guarantee. Webflow, on the other hand, offers a free version with basic features but does not provide a trial version or a money-back guarantee.

Webflow and Showit offer a variety of pricing plans to cater to different user needs, with Webflow providing more options for ecommerce.

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Winner: Webflow

Webflow offers managed hosting with a 99.99% uptime, and it leverages a globally distributed network of data centers from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fastly. Showit, on the other hand, offers managed WordPress hosting with a 99.9% uptime, but does not disclose any information about its data centers. Webflow’s superior uptime and transparency about its data centers give it the edge in this category.

🏆 Winner: Webflow

Both Webflow and Showit have strategies for speed optimization, but Webflow’s comprehensive approach and higher website speed optimization score give it the edge over Showit.

Webflow’s approach to website speed optimization includes custom cache settings, custom element lazy loading, automatic minification, responsive templates, and a content delivery network (CDN). This comprehensive approach results in an average load time of below 2 seconds and a PageSpeed score of 77.2/100. Webflow also focuses on improving components’ usability and places emphasis on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for Core Web Vitals improvements.

On the other hand, Showit’s strategies for speed optimization include optimization plugins and caching. However, its load times and PageSpeed scores vary depending on optimization and website complexity. Showit does not disclose any information on their Core Web Vitals improvements.

🏆 Winner: Showit.

Showit scores slightly higher with a 5.8, offering a variety of plugins primarily for users with the Advanced Blog plan, enhancing website functionality across SEO, spam protection, and more. Webflow, scoring 5.5, doesn’t have plugins or extensions in the traditional sense. Instead, it offers a built-in library of website elements and functionalities that you can use to create your website. This library is constantly being expanded, so you’ll always have access to the latest features and tools.

However, Webflow does integrate with a number of third-party services and tools that can add even more functionality to your website. These integrations are not managed by Webflow, so the number of available options and their pricing structures can vary depending on the specific tools you choose.

Webflow Applications

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Overall Winner: Webflow

. Webflow edges out Showit with a slightly higher score, offering a comprehensive suite of marketing tools including SEO, email marketing, blogging, social media integration, analytics and reporting, and ads and promotions. Showit also offers a robust set of marketing features, but falls slightly short in comparison to Webflow.

🏆 Winner: Webflow

. In the Webflow vs Showit comparison, Webflow takes the lead with a customer support score of 8.3. Webflow offers 24/7 support through live chat, email, and a community forum, ensuring users can get help whenever they need it. Additionally, Webflow provides extensive documentation and video tutorials, making it easier for users to navigate the platform and resolve issues independently.

Showit, on the other hand, has a customer support score of 6.4. Showit provides email support from Monday to Friday, 7 AM to 11 PM Arizona Time, with a typical response time of 1-2 hours. They also offer chat support during business hours for more immediate assistance. However, Showit’s support availability is limited on weekends, which may be a drawback for users needing urgent help outside of regular business hours.

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Winner: Showit

. Showit takes the lead in security with a score of 8.3, compared to Webflow’s 7.8. Showit’s commitment to data privacy and security is evident in its adherence to GDPR guidelines, secure and redundant data storage, and daily backups of design work and blog content. The platform also provides robust security features for all hosted websites, including free SSL certificates, automated backups, and additional protections for WordPress-integrated sites.

Webflow, while not as highly scored, still offers solid security measures. These include robust encryption techniques, strict access controls, regular system updates, and audits. Webflow also uses SSL encryption to secure data transmission and offers two-factor authentication for added security.

🏆 Winner: Webflow

. Although Webflow does not currently have AI capabilities, they have announced plans to introduce AI features in the future. These features are expected to improve the visual development learning journey, create and iterate designs faster with an AI copilot, and offer AI-customized templates for quicker website creation. On the other hand, Showit does not have any AI capabilities.

🏆 Winner: Webflow

. Webflow and Showit offer different approaches to user management.

• Webflow’s Core, Growth, and Enterprise plans offer unlimited editors, while others limit content editors to 3 or 10 per site. Access levels include Designer for full access and Editor for content editing. Workspace roles like Admin, Designer, and Editor ensure collaboration and security through features like the Site Activity Log and role-based permissions.
• Showit allows only one user on lower plans. On its Showit + Advanced Blog plan, the platform allows an unlimited number of users with different access levels.

Webflow User Roles and Access Levels:

Showit User Roles and Access Levels:

Additional Features

User Feedback

Webflow receives high praise for its user-friendly interface, eliminating the need for coding while offering extensive design flexibility. Users appreciate its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration of essential features like forms and CMS. However, some users note a slight learning curve and occasional limitations, particularly in ecommerce functionalities and content management. Overall, Webflow proves to be a powerful tool for building and managing websites, offering robust features for both beginners and experienced developers, albeit with some room for improvement in certain areas like collaborative editing and content management.

Showit, designed primarily for creative professionals, is appreciated for its drag-and-drop interface and dual canvas feature, which allows for independent design of mobile and desktop views. This high degree of customization and control over the website’s appearance on different devices is a standout feature. The seamless integration with WordPress for blogging makes it a popular choice among photographers, designers, and bloggers who value design flexibility and powerful blogging capabilities.

FAQ