Wix and Shopify are both publicly traded companies, while Automattic and Squarespace are both planning 2021 IPOs. Wix shares have gone from roughly ~$17 in 2013 to ~$257 today, while Shopify has gone from ~$20 a share in 2016 to ~$1,184 today. Automattic's flagship platform—Wordpress—is responsible for over a third of all sites on the web, and Squarespace was generating over $300 million in revenue back in 2017.
Webflow has roughly zero chance of replacing frontend developers, but the "everyone who needs a website and doesn't want to hire a frontend team" market is pretty large and has been for a longtime.
What makes Webflow interesting to me, and where it is a gamble, is where it stands on the spectrum of developer-friendliness to "can kind of use a computer"-friendliness. They seem to be betting on a change in the market, particularly around the emergence (or rapid growth) of a certain demographic: people who are familiar with web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS etc.) but who don't want to muck around in them directly to build a site—the "know enough to be dangerous" crowd, if I had to give it a name.
I don't know if that will work out exactly, and I personally don't really find it helpful, but it's interesting. At the very least, I personally know a lot of teams building non-SaaS products (infra tools etc.) that use Webflow for their frontend.
There was an explosion of these tools back in 2012. Products like Easel[0] and Macaw[1] came and went. Webflow is still here.
0 - http://easel.io (link is dead, I know)
1 - http://macaw.co
The main hangups right now are lack of transparent pricing around overages (it's "call for pricing") and we currently use AVIF and AV1 and those do not appear to be supported by webflow. I also think paid support tiers would be extremely helpful, like AWS. I'm actually happy to pay for good support straight from the company.
If anyone from webflow is listening, these are my main current requests.
Webflow support is ok, feature addition seems to be abysmal. Haven't seen anything significant since the last raise
Thunkable, Adalo, Bubble, those are no-code tools Webflow, Carrd (which I like but is also touted as no-code platform when it's basically a landing page builder) and in different categories Notion or Airtable... they're great tools but it feels misleading to call these "no code platforms"
The only legit no-code project I know of is https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
Honestly the whole experience was very underwhelming, but it might have been the team, not the product. Because there weren't components, it was hard to keep a consistent styling. And because the non-technical people didn't have a design sense, I ended up having to "clean" their work, then translate to CSS manually. I guess it was neat to try to explore example ideas, but a lot of those weren't translatable into "responsive" web pages (do people still do that anymore?).
