I understand it won’t be ideal to do that, but I’d like to know if it’s possible to create the front-end of a web app in Webflow, which would then be taken outside Webflow for back-end building and deployment.
Naturally this wouldn’t be a fantastically complex app, but the design team loves Webflow enough to ditch Sketch/other tools like Sketch in favour of Webflow. I do wonder if they can also just save time by going Webflow → Back-end → Live instead of Webflow → Front-end → Live?
Hey @chdaniel , you can easily create the front-end of a website in webflow and export the code.
Someone already made a list with all its features, availability and limits here
Sure you can.
You just have to make it very mobile friendly and nav like an app.
You may also want to add some codes to optimize your visitor’s experience:
Configuring Web Applications
HTML Tutorial => Web App
I consider myself a front-end dev, but I’m still in college and haven’t had much real work. Originally
Regards
illustration agency USA
Why not?
It could be not ideal because the tech used is not ideal, but having an HTML/CSS UI is something a lot of very good apps have.
It could be not ideal because Webflow isn’t marketed for designing apps UI, but Webflow Designer is very capable to design responsive anything. You can use the breakpoints to your advantage and set a series of upper containers to contain your design in height.
Apps are like websites, they have a very short lifespan of a few years. They need to work, that’s the only thing they really need to do. So either it’s native to an OS, or well developed by a team in NodeJS or React, or made by a single designer in Webflow, it’s all about how it works in the end and the balance of investment/result.
Can you be a bit more precise about this? Interesting topic.
Hey Vincent! Lovely to see you — you might not know me but I, like many others, know you from the many topics you’re present on. Thanks for doing such a wonderful job.
I get what you’re saying and my thinking is the same: if it works, it works. The discussion about this or that stack can be just noise, unless we’re talking about a specific super impactful use case (high scale, high impact etc).
That said, I wanted to see if anybody’s gone down this route before and what caveats might be there.
Yep! So the classical scenario you’ll know is
Since Webflow kinda intertwines the FE dev role and the designer role (in my case, it turned me from a designer to a designer+FE person), I was thinking whether the output of a Webflow project can be taken straight to the BE developer, and then to deploying the app.
Of course, that implies super fancy stuff like a library won’t be used (can we…? say chartJS as a random example?), or that we won’t be able to make a single page application… but for a no-code solution it might be just the right tool for the right people who are just starting off.
What do you think @vincent ?
Thanks so much for that 
I don’t see why not. I had a huge front end multilingual site designed in Webflow, and it was exported and the back end was Drupal. We even had at a moment a Webflow hosted Webflow CMS site, that was still taking most of its content from a Drupal backend/server/database. The front end was using 3 things to call the backend: 1. a custom JS API written by the backend guys, 2. custom HTML attributes on various elements, with various vocabulary as values, eg. those were for boxes to be live populated by drupal dynamic content, and 3. some hard written anchors like {title} inside of text elements, to call dynamic content at specific places. Basically templating.
Another example was a site designed in Webflow and the backend was developed in nodejs.
Hi Daniel,
Just wanted to drop a reply to tell you that I am in the exactly same situation as you. I just finished a discovery phase with a Customer Software Development Agency. They delivered me a PRD, infra & software architecture, technical risk analysis, test strategy, CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE and Cost breakdown estimation…
Not to my surprise I found out that the cost of development was way to expensive… more than 100k and much of that costs allocated for front dev…
So I obviously reviewed the prototype and scoped the solution further down while keeping the main solution to the main problem and thinking lean to try to reduce the estimation but… still falling in my budget!! arrghh
Now the question is whether I decide to create the frontend on webflow, exporting the clean code and merging it into the backend (many risks: scalability, dependencies,…) or if I decide to build a promotional website pitching the Saas solution as if it was existing and record the sign-in clicks as proof of market traction.
Proof of market traction will then allow me to raise some money from investors to custom build the product with scalability…
This reduce the risk of waisting my time and money on a idea/solution that is not market-fit and allow me to create an audience/community which I could then use to iterate my mvp for development.
What are your plans, do you wish to go bootstrap or are you open to have external investors?
Happy to exchange with you more closely if you wish to!
Wishing you you all the best on your journey!
Take care,
Laurent
This is a good use-case for the recently announced feature: DevLink | Webflow