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Comment by mosr | Hacker News Reader

> If it’s a Saas company, tech startup, design agency, or enterprise, I strongly strongly recommend Webflow for their marketing site even though they think they want JAMstack

Yeeeah but no. Companies (especially those ones) can have plenty of good reasons to need more control / custom code / integrations / etc. I think a lot of people don't realize how crippling and limiting committing to Webflow can be, and how much you end up hacking around it. Raises hand

https://www.plasmic.app gives you the same (actually, a FAR better) visual editor that plugs into whatever codebase you want. More people need to know about them.

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Plasmic shows more promise as a solution for designers on product teams to take over CSS styling on the product itself (eg. your SaaS app with a react frontend). But I think they still have a long way to go on the visual editor...last time I checked their editor didn't even work on Safari.

Using Plasmic + JAMstack on a marketing site would be the worst of both worlds IMO. All the static site hassles with none of the stuff that makes static sites fun for me.

It gives design and marketing the ability to edit landing pages, but they still have to bug the engineers for bigger changes to the site structure.

The biggest advantage to Webflow is its super versatile CMS, and separate simplified editor for content teams. Our engineering team literally never has to touch anything on our main domain. Marketing/Design completely owns it. Our engineers focus entirely on our product.

Like all developer-centric tools coming out of the JAMstack ecosystem, Plasmic seems to ignore the existence of content marketing and SEO (Wordpress's writing experience and friendliness for non-devs is why they won the internet), which is the entire point of having a marketing site in the first place.

Hello! I work on Plasmic. Thanks for the feedback (and thanks mosr for the shout-out!). Webflow is a great platform, glad you're on it - we're fighting the same fight.

Just wanted to share that our main use case actually has been for marketing sites (apps are a minority) and giving content editors autonomy. We do spend a lot of time on page performance, SEO concerns, etc.

Publishing new pages and other site structure changes (and even publishing new sites) does not actually require bugging engineers. Letting marketers/designers own the site and freeing up developers is our entire focus.

We are also working on a simplified content editing mode that restricts design changes.

Appreciate your following along with our progress, and hope we can continue hearing your feedback - that's how we make the product better for you.

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