Good. Solid. But not actually a Webflow or WordPress replacement.
I've been putting off writing this review because I've been thinking out my points, but I think it's pretty straight forward and my hesitation was avoiding the simple truth that Webstudio isn't as general purpose as it seems.
✅ Easy to use interface, like Webflow.
✅ No ecosystem lock. Designed to work with other tools.
✅ Super dedicated team, so it seems.
❌ It builds a webapp, not WYSIWYG HTML
❌ Therefore, the export is a webapp, not an HTML5 website
❌ Using the existing tooling is confusing if coming from web
So, most of these cons relate to this: Webstudio is building a webapp, not a website. There's a difference. Most of Webflow is used to throw together simple sites that just need pages, or some light CMS driven pages at most. I really wanted to see a Webflow-like experience here, but Webstudio isn't that. Instead of using DIVs and getting to set the HTML tags (DIV, SECTION, ARTICLE, etc.), which I'm sure is or will be possible somehow, it uses this "Box" notion. That's framework type of stuff... not straight HTML5. When building a navigation menu, for instance, I realized that you don't build one responsive menu for the different breakpoints... if you want to switch from menu links to a hamburger menu, you hide the first menu and build a second. Uhhh... no thanks? Then, going to hide the appropriate menu, I assumed "Box" meant "DIV"... it didn't. I had to go two levels nested under the "Box" to set the show/hide toggle. Thats... not HTML.
That's a framework sitting on top of HTML, but I thought this was supposed to sit atop HTML5 in a more flexible way, and let us use frameworks if we want. Not lock us into whichever framework Webstudio design around.
I think this is 100% a useable product, but while the applicable market seems so broad like it is with other site builders... this ultimately isn't a site builder. It's a webapp builder.
Chances are, this product would work best if you and your team know how to run databases and code a bit and put some really cool features together but just don't really want to hand-code the UI/UX, so you'd do that here in Webstudio. Then, you'd likely turn right around and use Webflow like normal to build your one-page promotional website.
Webflow designs the www.foo that forwards to app.foo.
Webstudio designs the UI for app.foo.
Not to impose my wants here, but based on the description, I was wanting a new approach to the sitebuilder business than applying sitebuilder methodology to a more robust low-code app UI builder.
TLDR; This isn't a site builder. It's a UI builder for webapps that could, of course, also be used to build just a regular site.
Alex_Webstudio
May 9, 2024Thanks for the review Chase! Some great points here as well as some areas I wanted to clarify.
I'll just address the areas of clarification in this response as the rest is pretty spot on.
Webstudio is not a static site builder, it's a WebApp builder that can be used to build websites: This is 100% correct. We're using the remix (react) framework to deploy webapps which comes with a bunch of benefits that we are only just scratching the surface of. At the cost of not having basic "static html". In our current state of development, the main benefits you'll notice from using remix over static sites is with performance (especially as the project starts to grow). If anyone is interested in reading more about this I'd invite you to checkout the remix site, they do a great job of explaining what makes remix special: https://remix.run/
Next up, the "Box" notion and webstudio not using straight HTML5. There are two parts to this:
- First, the review tells me that our naming of "box" is probably not the right term and is something we need to think about changing. Each box is actually just a div. Each box (div) can be set to it's appropriate html tag (DIV, SECTION, ARTICLE etc). When adding a new box/div to your project, this outputs a single div in HTML. The same principle applies to all our general, text, form and image components (essentially anything that's not part of a framework). These output exactly what is input, in plan HTML5.
- There are no frameworks that sit on top of your HTML unless you use frameworks. Currently, we have built-out one framework integration (radix components) which has served as a boilerplate of sorts for us to open things up to the community and allow anyone to integrate other web frameworks to their project. We plan to open up our API access in the first half of this year and add frameworks to our app marketplace. I totally see where the confusion comes from here, as there is only one framework it tends to lead to the assumption that webstudio requires a framework for it's components. Definitely taking some notes here to help adapt our UI/Comms. TLDR of this: If you use HTML5 components, it outputs exactly what you give it as HTML. If you use components that are part of a framework, it uses the building blocks of that framework and maps it to a visual UI.
As for the breakdown of show/hide stuff on desktop/mobile to achieve a desired output, you're spot on here, though this is really just temporary. As we currently only have radix as a framework for components like popups and hamburger menus, the platform is limited by what radix can do. A workaround to this would be to use dynamic data bindings for repeated elements (like menus) or potentially the slot component (which works like webflow symbols/global elements). As our library of components grow, this will also become easier to implement.
Lots of room for improvement that me and the team are hunting, much of which I'm sure will release this year. Thank you again for taking the time for such a detailed writeup. 🙏💗😇