Using a 3rd Party CMS with Webflow?

Design help CMS
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Hey there - I was wondering if anyone had experience or seen using a 3rd Party CMS with Webflow? I’ve been having many difficulties using their CMS, as it’s just not a very good experience as a content editor, and it hasn’t been meaningfully updated in years.

Does anyone have tips for making it a better experience? Or any workflows?

Thanks!
Sebastian

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@Sebastian_Scholl you most certainly can, but it doesn’t come without costs.

Many folks use Airtable but you have to understand that it’s not integrated into Webflow like the native Webflow CMS is. Displaying information to a page is where that becomes tricky.

Overview

Here are a couple of walkthroughs to get you familiar with it:

The above demonstrates using Airtable.

This last one shows you how to use Google Sheets.

You can see that hooking this up is fairly trivial, but again, getting the data to display on a Webflow page is tricky.

Solution

What many folks do to work around is this is set up and use an external CMS, such as those mentioned, to sync with your Webflow CMS.

Examples:

Form example, native Webflow forms submit information into an external CMS, which triggers a Webhook to then populate your Webflow CMS.

You open up your external CMS (with their ease of use, good experience as a content editor, etc…) create, update, or delete from within it and the same Webhook then automatically updates your Webflow CMS.

This way you get all the benefits with ease of use and still allow Webflow to display CMS info to your Webflow pages.

Successful Approach

Once you’re familiar with services like Make.com (ample free tier, cheap paid tier) this all becomes fairly trivial and teaches how to extend solutions that’ll exactly meet your needs no mater the unique use-case.

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As Chris said, many people use Airtable as their backend for Webflow. The advantage is you still get to design using the CMS, but you get to manage your data more easily in Airtable.

However, using Make to duct tape the two together can be very brittle and complicated. You can use a turn-key solution like PowerImporter to automatically sync Airtable to Webflow for you. It will take 2 minutes to setup instead of hours of trial and error with Make.

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Hi all.
Josh with Foxy here. I personally use PowerImporter and we recommend it to our hundreds of Foxy + Webflow users. If you’re needing to sync Airtable data with Webflow CMS, PowerImporter is the solution!

Josh

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Hey @Sebastian_Scholl!

What you’re describing is not uncommon. We see a ton of people who decide to use a 3rd party CMS with Webflow b/c their data needs require it.

We built a tool called Whalesync for this exact reason. It 2-way syncs data in real-time between Airtable and Webflow, so you can use Airtable as your CMS.

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