Over the last few months, we've watched a steady stream of startups move their marketing sites off Webflow and Framer and onto frameworks like Astro and Next.js.
The main reason tends to be ease of change. Founders like being able to prompt a new landing page and have it roughly ready in a few minutes. There are pricing and performance benefits too, but flexibility with AI-tooling is often the driving force.
Webflow and Framer have both added agentic features and MCP support, and they are improving quickly. But neither offers the flexibility of a code repository you own outright. So which should you pick going into 2027? It depends on how you want to work with your site.
The fundamental difference
Webflow is a visual builder. You design on a canvas, Webflow turns that into its own proprietary code, and your pages, CMS content and hosting all live inside Webflow's platform. That is convenient, but it also means you have little oversight of how your site is built or how it works under the hood. You work within what the platform allows.
Astro is a framework. Your site is a folder of code that sits entirely within your organisation, in your own repository, deployed wherever you choose. You decide exactly how every part of it works, from how pages are structured to where content comes from. If you're new to it, we've written a fuller explainer on what Astro is and why startups are moving to it.
Neither is better in the abstract. They are built for different ways of working.
Where Webflow still wins
If you want visual control over your website down to the finest detail, Webflow and Framer are hard to beat. You can nudge spacing, tweak an animation or restyle a section on the canvas and see the result instantly, without touching code or describing the change to an AI.
You also get a lot taken care of for you:
- A built-in CMS your team can use from day one.
- Hosting, SSL and a global CDN, all handled by the platform.
- Visual editing that a designer or marketer can pick up without a developer.
- One vendor to call when something goes wrong.
If your site will mostly stay as it is, and the only regular changes are new blog posts or the odd copy tweak, that convenience is big plus. You don't have to think about your website much at all, and for plenty of companies that is exactly right.
Where Astro wins
Astro comes into its own when your site needs to change often, and quickly.
Because the whole site is code, an AI agent like Claude Code can read it, understand it and change it at scale. Ask for a new landing page and it can be built from your existing components in minutes. Want to trial three hero layouts, or A/B test a pricing section? The agent can make the variants, set up the test and ship it the same afternoon.
Changes that would take hours of clicking on a canvas, like renaming a product across forty pages or reworking the navigation, become a single request.
That is the real distinction. Webflow is better for quick, visual, on-canvas updates. Astro is better for quick, large-scale updates driven by an agent.
Owning the code also means you can connect your site to the rest of your AI tooling. Your agent can pull in analytics and search data, see how each page is performing, and suggest or make changes based on what it finds. The site stops being a separate tool you log into and becomes part of how your team already works.
Add the other benefits, such as fast pages by default, no per-seat pricing and the freedom to host anywhere, and it's easy to see why so many teams are making the switch.
The trade offs of choosing Astro
Owning your site means owning the decisions Webflow used to make for you. With Astro, you will need to:
- Choose and set up hosting, such as Netlify, Render, Vercel or Cloudflare.
- Pick a CMS, such as Sanity, and connect it to the site if your team needs one.
- Handle redirects, forms, analytics and the other details a platform usually bundles in.
- Keep the codebase well structured, so an agent can keep working on it reliably.
None of this is difficult for a developer or agent, but it is real friction if you just want a website that works. You also lose the canvas unless you use a tool like etal. If someone on your team wants to drag things around visually every week, they'll need to get comfortable describing changes to an AI instead.
This is where working with an agency helps. We can set up your hosting, CMS and codebase for you, and stay on hand to look after them, so you get the freedom to customise your site with AI without the friction of launching and managing it all yourself.
Where Webflow's Source fits in
There is one more thing worth knowing before you decide. At Webflow Conf 2026, Webflow previewed Source, a new agentic platform due to roll out in 2027. We covered it in our roundup of the Webflow Conf 2026 announcements.
We don't know a great deal about it yet. From what Webflow has shown so far, Source looks set to open any code repository, whether that is an Astro site or a Next.js app, and make edits to it in a far more agentic way than the current Webflow product can.
If that's the case upon its release, moving to Astro doesn't have to mean leaving Webflow for good. You could move to Astro now for the speed and control, then bring Webflow back into the picture through Source later if you like what it offers.
So which should you pick in 2027?
Stick with Webflow or Framer if:
- You want precise, visual control over every detail of your site.
- You want a built-in CMS and hosting taken care of.
- Your site will mostly stay as it is, apart from blog posts and small updates.
- You would rather not think about your website at all.
Move to Astro if:
- You want to ship updates to your site faster.
- You want to build new landing pages in hours instead of weeks.
- You want to trial different layouts and run A/B tests rapidly.
- You want to manage your site with AI tools like Claude Code, and understand how it is performing.
For most of the startups we speak to, the second list sounds more familiar, which is why Astro is the pick we'd recommend for 2027. But if the first list describes you, Webflow is still an excellent choice, and there is no reason to move for the sake of it.
Thinking about moving to Astro?
If you'd like help making the move, take a look at our Webflow to Astro migration service. We move every page, CMS item and redirect across, set up your hosting and CMS, and hand over a codebase that is ready for you to manage with AI. Not on Webflow? We migrate sites from Framer, WordPress and other platforms too.
Still deciding? Book a call and we'll tell you honestly whether Astro is right for your site.