Framer

What is Framer?

Framer started life in 2012 as a Mac prototyping tool built by Dutch founders Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk. Over time it evolved into something bigger: a visual website builder where designers draw layouts on a canvas and publish them as real, hosted websites with responsive behavior, animations and a built-in CMS.

The design experience feels like a modern design tool rather than a traditional website builder. You drag components onto a canvas, style them with the same kind of controls you would find in Figma or Sketch, and preview how everything behaves across breakpoints. For developers, Code Overrides drop React code into the mix, giving you escape hatches beyond the visual editor.

Framer AI, introduced in 2024, takes a text prompt and generates entire sections, pages or whole sites in seconds. That combination of AI generation and real publishing is what makes Framer stand out: the mockup you design is the site your visitors actually see.

Key Features

• AI site generation from a text prompt
• Responsive visual canvas with breakpoints
• Interactions, animations and scroll effects
• Built-in CMS with collections and dynamic content
• SEO tools, analytics and fast global hosting
• Code Overrides for React-level control
• Component library, templates and remixable sites
• Localization and multi-language support

How to get started

Sign up at framer.com and you can start building immediately on the free plan, which publishes your site on a framer.app subdomain. The easiest path is to pick a template, or simply describe the site you want and let Framer AI generate the first version.

From there you edit sections directly on the canvas, tune responsive breakpoints, add a CMS collection if you have recurring content like blog posts, and hit publish when you are happy. Connecting a custom domain moves you to a paid plan.

• Create a free Framer account
• Pick a template or describe your site with Framer AI
• Edit sections and styling on the visual canvas
• Add a CMS collection for dynamic content
• Publish and connect a custom domain

Use cases

• Startup and SaaS marketing sites
• Landing pages for launches and campaigns
• Portfolios and personal sites
• Product pages with animations and storytelling
• Agency client sites with CMS handoff
• Interactive prototypes that go straight to production

Pricing and licensing

Framer is proprietary software with a free plan and several paid tiers. The free plan gives you a framer.app subdomain and basic features, while paid plans add custom domains, extra pages, CMS collections, removal of the Framer badge and more advanced functionality.

Pricing scales from a small per-month fee for hobbyist sites up to higher tiers for agencies and large teams. Exact prices change periodically, so check the official website for current numbers.

Pros and cons

Framer shines when you want a beautiful, animated site fast. The AI generation, the polished template library and the fact that hosting is included mean a small team can ship a credible marketing site in an afternoon without a developer.

The trade-offs are cost, flexibility and lock-in. Paying per site adds up for agencies running many client projects, complex functionality still needs real code, and you are tied to Framer's platform. Very animation-heavy pages can also grow slow if you are not careful.

Alternatives

• Webflow: visual web design with a stronger developer ecosystem
• Wix Studio: website builder aimed at agencies
• Squarespace: polished templates with simple editing
• Figma: design and prototyping without publishing
• WordPress: maximum flexibility with themes and page builders