Webflow VS Editor X: A Detailed Comparison in 2022

What is Editor X?

Editor X is a modern website builder with a user-friendly interface. Since Wix released it in April 2020, it has gained more users and functionalities that developers can explore.

With Editor X’s excellent design capabilities, Wix is trying to penetrate a more sophisticated market of agencies and freelancers producing custom designs, modern animations, and interactions. Its drag-and-drop builder mixed with custom code and apps is gaining the attention of even the most demanding users.

What is Webflow?

Webflow is more than just a simple website builder; it’s also a CMS and hosting platform, which is an ideal solution for any small or mid-sized business that requires professional websites. Like Editor X, it also offers a drag-and-drop website editor for designing and publishing responsive websites. 

Webflow provides an all-in-one package for web designers and developers to turn their ideas into actual products. It provides a straightforward visual approach to building a web with classic HTML, CSS, and Javascript without the need for coding knowledge to start. As you go, Webflow becomes capable of bringing in that extra “wow” factor on top of its platform structure.

Comparison

1. Design Capabilities

Editor X

Drag-and-drop website builders are pretty popular these days. Editor X implements this mechanism using CSS Grid and Flexbox technologies, allowing users to build complete websites quickly by simply moving the elements and placing them on a page. You can create up to six break points to which your design will cascade from higher to lower ones, resulting in a responsive website.

The downside of Editor X is that its users do not have access to the DOM and cannot reuse any styling classes (CSS). It includes a feature called Design Library that allows users to save their designs and reuse them on other pages, but it is still impossible to change the styling across all pages.

Webflow

When it comes to exercising your creative freedom, Webflow is definitely one of the best website builders in the market. You can literally build any interface you want with it – all of which generate clean and modern HTML, CSS, and Javascript code that you can export and use in external applications.

It offers four standard breakpoints: Desktop, Tablet, Phone landscape, and Phone Portrait, but you are free to create more breakpoints if needed. This way, you will always be able to customize the interface according to any screen size.

Webflow allows users to style elements using classes in the same way you do with regular CSS. It enables users to make changes across all websites in a simple and robust manner.

If you have coding skills and understand the logic behind HTML elements and CSS classes, you will be able to explore the full potential of Webflow, albeit not mandatory. Even if you don’t have any prior knowledge of coding, you will be able to build and publish beautiful websites in Webflow.

2. Development Capabilities

Editor X

Editor X has an impressive CMS that you can use without touching a single line of code. Still, for more advanced users, it also offers an IDE that can insert custom code and expand the website’s functionalities. Editor X has a built-in IDE with syntax highlighting, code completion, and more.

Webflow

Webflow has always been used as a tool to create professional-level code for your front-end needs. That means the platform has always looked into making code control more straightforward and robust.

So if you are looking to have complete control over your DOM, HTML structure, CSS, and Javascript, then Webflow is the right tool for you.

3. Hosting Plans

Editor X

Editor X has two sets of plans to choose from. The Website Plans are ideal for portfolios, blogs, and personal projects. They allow users to connect custom domains, hide Editor X’s brand, and include a free SSL certificate starting at US$22/month.

The Business and eCommerce Plans are necessary if the user plans to have online payments on the website. In addition to all the Website Plans functionalities, it also allows the creation of plans, recurring payments, and customer accounts. It starts from $29/month.

Webflow

Webflow also has two main sets of plans to choose from depending on whether you need ecommerce capabilities.

Site plans are best for simple or content-driven websites and larger, high-traffic marketing sites. The site plans start from a free option, which has a limit of 2 pages and no custom domain, to more expensive options like the CMS plan from $20/month, which includes a custom domain, up to 2,000 CMS items and three guest editors.

eCommerce plans are best for powering no-code ecommerce businesses. If you plan to have ecommerce capabilities on your website, you will have to add an ecommerce plan to your Webflow website. The Standard ecommerce plan is $29/month and allows you to have up to 500 items and $50k in annual sales volume, but it also has a 2% transaction fee. If paying 2% on your sales seems too much, you can upgrade to the Plus ecommerce plan to have 0% transaction fees for a monthly cost of $84/month.

4. Collaboration

Editor X

Editor X offers a wide range of options when it comes to collaboration on building your website. You can invite members and assign them any custom roles existing on the platform as admins, managers, designers, content editors, billing, and many more. Moreover, you can also create custom roles by selecting very specific actions you want a particular user to be able to perform on your website. You can even choose particular pages the user should or should not be able to edit.

Webflow

Webflow is more limited in terms of different roles you can assign to your collaborators, but it also offers the option to define website users and team users.

If you have a CMS site plan, you’ll be to invite three guest editors (ten if you have the Business Site plan). These users cannot access the designer site(where you build the website) but only the content manager site. It is ideal if you plan to allow the client to update the content and CMS entries and protect your website structure from any unintentional change.

If you have a team account (called Workspaces in Webflow), you can add users to it and allow them to interact with all the websites in your workspace account fully. It is ideal to include your team’s designers and developers as you collaborate on multiple projects simultaneously. This option has a cost starting from $28/month.

5. Transfer (Editor X cannot export code)

Editor X

In Editor X, transferring a website to a different user is effortless. This is a critical feature if you plan to design the website in your account and then transfer it to your client’s account as you finish the project.

Webflow

It is also easy to transfer a website in Webflow, but you need to be on a paid Workspace plan for this. Starting from the Core Workspace plan, you can transfer the project to a different owner, the same as Editor X.

The difference is that Webflow also offers the option to export your code (as HTML, CSS, and Javascript files) and then use it in any way you would like. Using the files to publish your website on a different host is even possible. Although, the export code does not include CMS content and functionalities. 

6. SEO

Editor X

Editor X and Webflow offer a similar system to manage your SEO. In Editor X, you can specify the metadata for your page, set alt tags for images, 301 redirects and more advanced features such as Social Share image, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and Schema.

Webflow

Webflow also offers a wide range of customizations for SEO. All of the options in Editor X are present in Webflow, and the workflow is similar. If you take your time to fill in all the information, your website will be better optimized to rank in search results.

7. App Market and Integrations

Editor X 

Editor X offers access to the Wix App Market, which provides hundreds of apps to connect and expand the functionalities of your website. You can find robust apps to help you integrate external tools, add marketing capabilities, improve SEO, and pretty much anything you can imagine. 

The downside is that Editor X is a relatively new system, and not all apps are compatible.

Webflow

Webflow doesn’t have an App Market unlike Editor X. Instead, Webflow will use Integrations to expand your website functionalities. Several apps offer native Webflow integration. But suppose the specific tool you are willing to integrate doesn’t have a native integration. In that case, Zapier can provide a workaround by directly integrating the tool API to your Webflow website through custom code. This, of course, needs some knowledge in code to implement, but the flexibility you get from it is definitely worth it. 

8. Templates

Editor X

Editor X has already grown its template library to more than 40 templates that you can duplicate and use for free to start your website. The templates are responsive and very professional-looking and are built using up-to-date HTML tags and CSS proprieties to ensure your website can work well across different browsers and screen sizes. 

Webflow

Webflow has a more extensive collection of templates than Editor X, offering over 1,000 business, portfolio, and blog templates you can customize with Webflow’s code-free design tools.

Depending on the template complexity, many of the best Webflow templates are paid, usually ranging from $49 to $149. Even though you have great free templates, sometimes you will find that buying a good template can save you several hours in development. 

9. eCommerce

Editor X

Editor X inherits the eCommerce functionalities from WIX, so it comes with a robust online store and payment system. Editor X allows you to implement quick checkout and custom tax groups, sell digital products, accept bookings, sell subscriptions, and much more.

Webflow

Webflow eCommerce is very flexible in how you structure and build your pages, but it still lacks a simple way to implement some functionalities that some users may find critical. You will probably have to bring in some external apps if you want to create a more complex store.

Keep in mind that Webflow is very powerful and flexible in terms of design. So if you are planning to build a more straightforward store but wants to deliver an excellent user experience/user interface or a richer buying experience, you can definitely profit from using Webflow and mix it with external apps to include custom functionalities. 

10. Price

Editor X

Website Plans

These plans suit anyone who doesn’t need to take online payments. It is ideal for building blogs, online portfolios, and marketing websites.

In this category, you get three plans to choose from:

• Essential – from $22 per month
• Extra – from $39 per month
• Ultra – from $49 per month

Business and eCommerce Plans

If you plan to sell products online or take any form of payment, you’ll need to choose one of the Business and eCommerce specific plans.

In this category, you can choose from:

• Launch – from $29 per month
• Boost – from $69 per month
• Scale – from $219 per month

Webflow

Webflow’s pricing has been changing a lot lately; by now, it offers ten different plans. Webflow is all about scalability, so you could expect to find many other options, but it can also make the decision process a bit harder to figure out.

Webflow’s plans are divided into two categories: Site plans and Workspace plans. Site plans are ideal if you want to publish your site on Webflow hosting and use a custom domain, while Workspaces are best if you plan to work on multiple projects.

Site plans

As mentioned, this plan allows you to host your site with Webflow and add a custom domain. You will be able to invite guest editors and collaborate on your website.

• Starter – free (very limited, basically just for testing purposes)
• Basic – from $15 per month
• CMS – from $20 per month
• Business – from $45 per month

eCommerce Plans (under Site plans category):

• Standard – from $42 per month
• Plus – from $84 per month
• Advanced – from $235 per month

Workspace plans

This plan allows you to assign roles and permissions, increase unhosted site limits, add team members to your Workspace, and transfer sites to other Workspaces.

• Starter – free (1 seat, two unpublish sites)
• Core – from $19 per month per seat (user)
• Growth – from $49 per month per seat (user)

11. GPDR compliance

Data privacy compliance can be really complex. In over 80 countries, privacy laws have been enacted in order to improve information privacy and security. GDPR, the CCPA, and the LGPD are just three examples of privacy legislation.

The first thing you need to do is tounderstand your legal obligations depending on your website region/audience region, as privacy laws that apply to your website can be affected by both your and your visitor’s country of residence.

For a start, you will need to define your privacy policy, deciding how you will capture, protect and share user data. Then it would be best if you let your users access this information, understand how the website processes their data, and choose to accept or deny it. 

Editor X

Editor X states that it is GPDR compliant and offers a guide for GPDR compliance to help you avoid many of the usual mistakes. Clearly, Editor X takes privacy laws compliance seriously and is working to improve on it. 

Webflow

Webflow doesn’t state that it is GDPR compliant. So it is strictly up to you to implement measures to achieve at least some level of compliance here. This can seem intimidating, but it is the same process as in Editor X. You will also have to set up a tool to manage your cookies and define your privacy policy. One thing to consider is that the Webflow forms are not GPDR compliant as Webflow servers are located in the United States. Therefore, you will send any information captured in a form across EU borders, which is not allowed by GPDR. In this case, you will have to integrate an external app to manage your forms. 

12. Translation

Editor X

The Editor X community has been asking for a multilingual solution for a long time, and it looks like they finally got what they wanted. Since August of 2021, Editor X has offered Wix Multilingual, an app (still in beta and only for premium accounts) that allows you to add and customize translations to your website. Supporting more than 180 languages, you can translate your whole website, review it, and make changes if and where necessary.

Editor X also allows you to export/import your translation so you can work on it offline or send it to your professional translator to review it. You can customize SEO and URL for each language of your website.

Webflow

Webflow is not the right tool for you if your main goal is to have a simple way to translate your website. As Webflow itself doesn’t offer any special tool or method to implement translations, users tend to try to fix this with two main approaches:

Duplicate all your pages for each language and translate them. This may work for small websites with just a few pages. But it can easily create problems as it is hard to keep the content updated in all languages in the long term. 

Implement a third-party solution. This implies extra costs, but it can save you so much time that it may pay you back shortly. Weglot is the most used tool for this. With a quick setup, you’ll be able to have automatic translation, import/export tools, and SEO customizations as language subdomains.

Conclusion

Editor X and Webflow are great tools for creating stunning websites without having a big budget or a comprehensive team. The best choice for you depends heavily on how much you understand web design and what your end goal is. Below are how these two website builders differ in a nutshell:

Editor X – Ideal for small business owners and current Wix users.

Do you want to create the first website for your own business but need a more engaging interface than the regular Wix websites? Or do you focus on selling products without worrying too much about the details of the user experience? If that is the case, then Editor X is your go-to tool.

Many people see Wix as that limited drag-and-drop website builder, but with Editor X, the company is really trying to level things up. You will notice that many of the old complaints about Wix limitations have been removed or at least minimized with Editor X.

Webflow – Ideal for bigger companies and freelancers

Of course, you can also use Webflow to build your own small business website, but you will only be able to explore Webflow’s full potential if you have at least some technical knowledge. This is suitable for freelance designers looking for a platform to create amazing-looking websites quickly for their clients and who are willing to invest some time learning and exploring.

Many bigger companies are choosing Webflow for their marketing or corporate websites. Usually, they choose Webflow for two main reasons: speed and versatility. Building in Webflow is really fast, especially after you have all the classes and components in place. And the control you have over your code in Webflow makes it so versatile that virtually any design is possible to implement. 

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