Let's make this simple: The biggest difference between Webflow vs Bubble is lies in what can you create with these development platforms—web applications or websites.
They can both put out much light when it comes to building responsive sites. Still, Webflow is better at creating fully custom websites.
Bubble, on the other hand, is great for web app development, making it accessible to those without years of experience in learning programming languages.
Let’s dive into details.
Quick Overview: Webflow vs Bubble
What Can You Build With Webflow?
With Webflow, you can build sites without coding (or low-coding) knowledge while managing and designing dynamic pages, including interactions and animations easily.
You can also integrate third-party services to scale your business website. In Webflow, you can easily manage SEO settings.
All in all, Webflow is a robust tool that lets you quickly build excellent-looking web pages.
With Webflow, you can create a variety of websites, ranging from SaaS, startups, SMEs (small to medium businesses), agencies, to venture capital firms.
What Can You Build With Bubble?
Bubble is also a great tool that doesn’t require any coding knowledge. It features an intuitive visual programming language that empowers users to build web applications fast.
As one of the customers said:
Its user-friendly interface significantly reduces the development time, allowing for rapid deployment and iterative improvements. [G2.com]
Bubble allows you to create a database within your application and gives you complete control of designing your interface through the canvas.
It also allows you to stitch your whole appliation together using workflows, which act as a series of logic. Finally, it also allows you to natively integrate with third-party tools and services.
With Bubble, it is possible to create web applications and publish them on app stores. Those could be custom marketplaces, on-demand services, social networks, e-commerce stores, artificial intelligence solutions, booking apps, dashboards, internal management tools, finance apps and more.
Learn in more detail what can you build with Bubble.
Can You Use Webflow and Bubble Together?
Yes, you can use Webflow and Bubble in a way that API integration allows you to integrate your Bubble app into Webflow.
There are different ways when you need to use Webflow and Bubble together:
- Building company website using Webflow, but web app is on Bubble due to user account limitations in Webflow.
- There is a desire for consistent design across the website and web app, but Bubble's different design tools present a challenge.
- Common practice involves creating homepages and landing pages on Webflow, but the "Sign Up" or "Login" buttons redirect users to the Bubble app for account creation or login functionalities.
You can automate workflows with Webflow and Bubble using Zapier's templates. From lead management, marketing campaigns, customer support, data management, to tickets and incidents—you can automate crucial parts of your business.
Webflow vs Bubble: Ease-of-Use
Comparing the learning curves of Bubble and Webflow, Bubble presents a steeper ascent. To effectively navigate Bubble, users must grasp programming fundamentals such as data types, logic, and workflows.
To tackle the best applications, users must also understand Bubble’s intricate logic and structure. Conversely, Webflow’s intuitive visual interface simplifies the learning process.
Moreover, in Bubble, workflows are the backbone for creating application logic. This is much more improved than traditional coding practices. These workflows dictate how the application behaves and responds.
For instance, users can optimize actions such as logging in a user when they click a designated button—all seamlessly managed within the workflow editor.
Webflow: Ease-of-Use
Building, styling, and reusing forms in Webflow is easy. And if you want to restore previous versions of your website, you can do it with Webflow's backup functionality effortlesly.
It's also straightforward to use Webflow's 'interactions' JavaScript tool. It helps you create impressive animations for page loads, scrolling, and mouse-hover effects effortlessly.
However, what sets Webflow apart is its ability to break down designs into HTML, JS, and CSS components. This means you can reuse your designs on platforms like WordPress with ease, thanks to code exports.
Now, starting a blog may seem daunting at first. Designing pages like blog posts, categories, and authors from scratch can be a challenge. However, you can choose the Webflow template to make the process easier.
In essence, Webflow offers a powerful yet user-friendly platform for building websites and blogs.
Bubble: Ease-of-Use
Setting up and using Bubble is easy.
Bubble’s sign-up process helps point you in the right direction. It asks you what your goals are.
How comfortable are you with learning new technology? At which stage are you with your project?
If you prefer not to start your app development from scratch, consider using one of Bubble's recommended templates to jumpstart your project.
Additionally, Bubble offers the option to connect with agencies for outsourcing app development, potentially providing valuable learning opportunities.
Left-hand menu: prominently showcases essential elements.
Design element allows you to design visual interface. You can easily add different elements, such as text, images, buttons, input fields.
Simply drag and drop the components.
Once you’ve done with design, you can start stitching everything together with workflows.
Workflow:
Workflows are essential for establishing the logic within your application. In traditional coding, logic dictates how a computer behaves and responds. For instance, you could set a rule like 'if a user is logged out, log them in when they click a specific button.'
This level of control is precisely what you can achieve using the Bubble’s workflow editor.
After creating your workflow, it automatically triggers each time an element on your page is clicked. Bubble conveniently generates a default workflow for you, as seen here.
Within this menu, you can select the action you want to take. For example, you might choose to update the user's credentials when they click a button.
Database editor:
It allows you to create a series of what’s called data types within your applicaation. In other words, this allows you to identify all of the data that you would like to store within your actual application.
Bubble offers a good amount of customization in UI builder area. It lets you choose from layers, visual elements, containers, input forms to reusable elements. Styles are adjustable for each element.
Take shapes, for example.
You can choose from different styles and the Style Editor also lets you adjust opacity, background style, border style shadow style and more.
Let’s break down each of these individual superpowers:
Data types: Define anything users will create in your app. For a tutorial, check this video (starting at 20:22).
App data: View all saved user’s data (e.g., ser photo, email, phone).
Styles: Customize the visual appearance of your app, including fonts, colors, and layout.
Plugin: Extend your app's capabilities with third-party plugins if native features don't suffice. Many plugins are free.
Webflow vs Bubble: Design
Both builders are flexible when it comes to design.
See how.
Webflow Design
The Webflow Designer lets you easily manipulate HTML elements (e.g., sections, buttons, forms, text and media) to build your site structure. However, don’t think of the Webflow’s interface as a simple drag and drop builder. It is much more likely that you will encounter a relatively steep learning curve.
Still, as you build your website, you don’t have to write any code. The Webflow Designer generates clean, optimized, web-ready code that search engines will like. Then again, for highly customized site, you’ll have to be ready to learn the basics of coding.
Very powerful design functionality can be seen on the left side of the Designer. After incorporating elements, you can customize each one using the controls provided on the right side of the interface.
Bubble Design
Bubble will start from a white canvas (i.e., Design) where you can drag and drop visual elements like text, button, icon, image, etc.
When you drop your desired element on the blank canvas, you’ll see a window with all the functionalities, commands and instructions regarding that specific element.
Here is how Bubble’s flexbox responsive engine works:
Simply drag and drop the desired element (we did it with the icon).
You can upgrade to what’s called their flexbox responsive engine. And this new responsive engine leverages the CSS flexbox framework. It completely overhauls the way in which you can build app.
There are different types of elements (e.g., visual, container, input, reusable) you can utilize when creating the visual interface of your app.
Webflow vs Bubble: Templates
Both Webflow and Bubble templates come in multiple captivating, genre-based styles, such as Finance, Landing Page, Marketplace, SaaS, Blog and more. Webflow lets you preview how the template looks in browser or Webflow’s designer, before you have to make a decision.
And Bubble also feature a simple preview option. You can select templates for a more dynamic layout options, but remember that you cannot switch them once you've selected one.
Webflow Templates
You can browse from popular tags, categories, languages, styles, features, and types.
From one page to startup, each template is designed with specific needs in mind. If you are an agency looking to elevate your online presence, there are a variety of templates that help you invite potential clients to explore your brand's unique offerings throughout your Webflow site.
Bubble Templates
Even though Bubble is a powerful no-code platform that allows you to build completely scalable web applications, it offers templates that guide you through the process with a set of principles and a responsive framework.
So, building your app becomes much more manageable.
For example, with Bubble’s openBuild Framework template, you get responsive framework, full style set, customizable HTML transactional email templates, customizable HTML transactional email templates and many more.
Bubble offers a wide range of attractive template options, and we particularly liked the filter options, such as Category, Cost, Experience, that let you filter in more detail your search options.
You can also preview each template details prior to starting the creation process.
Webflow vs Bubble: Plugins & Integrations
When comparing Webflow vs Bubble in terms of plugins and integrations, both platforms provide seamless integration with popular tools and platforms through their plugin marketplace.
For example, Bubble offers flexibility for custom integrations and plugin creation, allowing users to connect with external services via APIs and tailor functionalities to specific project requirements.
Whether you choose Webflow or Bubble, you'll have access to a wide range of plugins and integration options to enrich your web applications.
Webflow Plugins & Integrations
Webflow's plugins are external additions developed by third parties to enhance the platform's capabilities. On the other hand, while both apps and plugins can add extra functionalities to Webflow websites, apps are usually built-in features or tools provided by the platform itself.
Bubble Plugins & Integrations
Bubble provides all types of integrations, such as:
Within Bubble, you have filter options like types or categories, allowing you to select plugins tailored to your needs. For instance, if you opt for a Mailchimp integration, you can connect your Bubble app with your Mailchimp account to manage email campaigns and subscriber lists.
Webflow vs Bubble: Pricing
One thing is clear: Bubble’s pricing plans are much easier to understand than Webflow’s. Bubble pricing starts at $29/per month, while Webflow’s Basic plan starts at $14/per month.
Let's explore what else is worth mentioning.
Webflow: Pricing Plans
For $14 per month, the Basic account lets you connect a custom domain name, have 150 static pages, 500 form submissions, 50 GB bandwidth, and 250, 000 visitors.
At $23 per month, the CMS account adds 2,000 CMS items, 1000 form submissions, 3 content editors and more available bandwidth and visitors.
With a $39-per-month business plan, you have the same number of static pages as with a CMS plan, but more CMS items, editors, form submissions, bandwidth, and visitors. And if you're looking to collect files from site visitors using forms, you have a new feature, "form file upload," in this plan, which is the way to go.
In addition to these Site plans, Webflow also offers e-commerce plans and enterprise solutions. On the other hand, if you belong to an in-house team or you are a freelancer or agency, consider Workspace plans that offer much more customizable features.
Bubble: Pricing Plans
The ability to connect your custom domain, automate processes in your projects, restore option, power your project with 175,000 workload units, two days of server logs, and even approachable starting price of $29 per month make Bubble a worthy consideration.
There are five Bubble’s pricing plans, and besides Free and Starter, the relatively reasonable starting price on the Growth doesn’t make your consumers projects with complex functionality easy to scale.
For more highly configured options, consider the Team plan.
Webflow vs Bubble: Who Wins?
Webflow wins more of our categories than Bubble, but don’t rely on that fact. The crucial factor in deciding between Bubble vs. Webflow is that it hinges entirely on your needs.
Because Webflow is ideal for visually appealing websites and landing pages, offering advanced design capabilities and a design-centric approach. And Bubble is great for web applications.
You ask. We answer.
Rea is a versatile SEO writer with over 3 years of experience. At Nube, she devotes a high degree of attention to content focused on Webflow and design to establish topical authority in this field.
