I’m leaving Webflow, and I thought I’d leave a little feedback.
Webflow is a pretty great tool, especially for static sites. It allows almost full design control. The UI is fairly intuitive, particularly if you’re familiar with design programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.
The support, however, is not good.
I had the Personal plan, which promised email support. And, to be clear, whenever I emailed, I received a quick and polite response. I have absolutely no complaint about the people answering my emails.
The online documentation (videos, etc.) is often inaccurate, out-of-date, and skips steps that are critical to completing tasks. Many of the videos are purely promotional, and offer no information about completing tasks. (I found this most frustrating of all, because I like to solve my own problems when I can.)
Of course, the poor documentation meant that I tried to use the email support I was promised. However, unless my issue was a blatant bug, I was told to create a post in the forum. I was also told twice that support people are NOT ALLOWED to help with forum posts while they are “at work.” In case this isn’t clear, that meant that I took the time to do in-depth research (which meant watching oodles of useless videos and webinars), decided to contact support when I failed to find a solution, was told to construct a post (which meant re-creating all my careful descriptions and screenshots), and was then largely ignored.
Webflow seems to have a very weird culture around communication (as you can see if you read old forum posts about the release of the CMS).
There are some limitations to Webflow (such as how you can’t decide whether a class is created as a combo class or not), and I’m sure they will work these out over time. There are also viable work-arounds that exist right now, but absolutely no official documentation about using these work-arounds. This fits perfectly with the communication weirdness – rather than empowering users to succeed, the company pretends there isn’t a need.
I hope they get the whole documentation and support thing worked out. If they applied the same standards to documentation and support that they apply to the tool itself, things would be golden (some QA, content strategy, user testing, etc.)
I actually feel really bad for the guys (and gals?) who respond to support requests – it seems like they are caught in a terrible system that doesn’t allow them to actually provide support.
So, to summarize: The tool is great, but the support is bizarre and sucky. I think Webflow is very promising, and if I had a lot of extra money, I would stick around. I may be back in the future.
But that would be great if you could see the good things as I see them. All I can say is I don’t think the support is terrible, at all, quite the opposite. And if you find the product good, if you can cope with the limitations, then you should maybe stick around. I reckon I have less need for the help files and videos than others, and I may not be realizing the truth in what you say. What I’m sure about is that they’re working on it, all the time, and it will improve.
That’s my area of expertise, after all! – I’m a technical and instructional designer.)
help from members on this forum, many, many hours reading on the forum and tutorials, the great support of the webflowteam on email, I’ve managed to make my websites (with templates) with Webflow (my latest with some help).
