Hi, I would like to use webflow on the marketing/ecommerce/user-management side of a SaaS product. I was thinking to host the main application in a subdomain, or other domain, and I wanted to understand how to use the webflow authentication and user membership level to automatically log in my application
Unfortunately that’s not provided yet with Webflow Memberships. There is a wishlist item for this that you could add your vote and comment to help boost it: Allow 3rd party scripts to access the current | Webflow Wishlist
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Kia, Webflow Memberships has a lot of limitations that make it unsuitable as the core authentication system for a SaaS membership platform. Currently you can’t even shut down accounts immediately, or change a user’s email address, and there’s no means for Organization-level accounts.
Look in the direction of Devlink and React development if you want to design on Webflow but with full server-side functionality.
If you need a no-code approach, Wized + Xano is a great framework that can operate on top of a Webflow-hosted site.
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Thanks @memetican , how would you solve the multi-site shared authentication with devlink / wized / xano in broad strokes?
With Devlink you’re building and hosting and independent site, so you get Webflow designer capabilities, with whatever back-end you code. But you need to know how to code.
With Wized, you have an independent authentication framework- you’d need to check their forums for the solutions offered and see what might be compatible with whatever you’re trying to connect to.
With Memberstack you get SSO in the form of e.g Google Auth which at least reduces clicks and re-logins across sites. I believe it has some custom SSO integration options as well.
What’s being discounted here is the power and simplicity you gain from using a solution like Memberstack if Devlink is too much of a heavy lift (although you can use Memberstack along with Devlink to reduce that weight).
Webflow + Memberstack is the one-two punch that hits hard is many cases, for many reasons not discussed here.
Separating Webflow from a custom application is the typical use-case, and Webflow’s superpower.
Webflow and it’s hosting solution gives you the advantage of quick marketing updates, blog posts, etc… with (mostly) full design control that you can hand off to a non-technical person down the road - and these updates are outside of the normal development process.
Here’s a blog post walking through how companies use Webflow just like this:
Crossed Wires
I believe you’re getting your wires crossed a bit here. Understandable. It’s a big, complex topic.
If you have the marketing site hosted on your main domain, example.com, and the custom application on app.example.com, you don’t need to tap into Webflow Memberships (or anything else) to automatically log users into your application.
Your application, hosted on app.example.com would have its own authentication.
It’s literally a separate site that can be hosted on a different platform and is not tied to Webflow other than by the domain name.
Example
Go to https://convertkit.com
Next, tap on the login button, when you do you go to https://app.convertkit.com
I don’t believe they use Webflow but it doesn’t matter. Their marketing site, hosted on their main domain has no authentication.
You only get authentication when going to the app subdomain.
The 2 are not tied together other than by domain name.
Realize this is a company that generates 8-figures ARR and this is how they structure their site.
What about DevLink?
A large amount of pent up desire has been from folks wanting to bridge that gap with design work.
So app.example.com would have the same design as the Webflow site (example.com). Without Devlink you can spend a bunch of time kinda-sorta getting the same look and feel (with a lot of effort).
But this is the problem that Devlink fixes. You can automatically export your Webflow components into your custom application and share designs.
Now example.com and app.example.com look & feel exactly the same. And when you update your designs in the Webflow Designer, they can be automatically imported into your custom application.
But again, no authentication is shared.
Hope that helps!