Is Webflow's Headless CMS a Thing?

developers love headless until they'll uh they are stuck maintaining it. Uh and I feel like you will have some feelings about this. So the whole idea is should you use a CMS like web flow which has API and you know you can also build something around it and on top of it or should you go just completely headless and build your own CMS with a headless solution that you have to maintain and update and scale. Yeah. Well case by case basis but yeah yeah that that's a good way to put it in. But the way they showed it by the way is like with headless you have editor and then the headless and you do the web hook the localization AB testing things and then you do Mhm. you know the builds and then until you get to the live site and you have to handle the caching etc. With web flow you have just the CMS you edit visually and then you publish and that's it. Mhm. architecture, content, modeling, uh, hosting. Well, yeah, of course, hosting, but versioning. So, what are they comparing this to, by the way? This is looks like a comparison chart. Like, what are they? They're comparing it to headless to any headless, just general headless, any other headless CMS like Contentful, Prisma. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. and versioning like you do have to have a requires git based but web flow has built-in branching and staging and roll back. I'm sorry. Doesn't exactly because Web Flow has backups, but it doesn't I don't Maybe this is enterprise. So, can you can you go to a website and just buy the Web Flow headless CMS? Is that what they're saying here? Well, you could you could do that. You could buy the Web Flow, you could use the Web Flow CMS and then, you know, use the API to to use the content anywhere you want. So, this this is kind of forming the the backbone to my opinion here. It's like unless you can buy this separately and they offer it, you know, all of this stuff for, you know, $5, um, then cool. Starts to look a bit more appealing. But if if you can only get it when you have a Web Flow website, then really all this says to me is the only people who should use this are people that want to share data between their web flow website and yes, an external app. Yes. And I think that is also what they are realisting realistically looking at. So it's not really comparable to all of these other tools, right? Not necessarily. not in every this is just a really good feature to know that you can actually I I am surprised that you know you can you can read the web flow I thought you could read the all of this stuff through the web flow API anyway so I wonder what you can but uh I believe um I don't know if you have like some limits on it well you do have some limits if you if you use a uh an a free account and a free site plan, then you have a limit on the amount of CMS items that you can create and the amount of collections that you can create. Sure. So, how is this different then from, you know, whether it's free or paid? How is the headless CMS different from just me accessing the API? I don't know. I I don't know. I haven't read the entire you should have. No, I I just saw this and I was like I haven't read the entire thing. I I wonder through it and I don't understand everything. That's the part also the a part of the issue. I haven't worked with any headless CMS. Yeah. So I wonder if there's a UI that you can bolt onto. Let's um I don't think so. I don't think so. I think this is meant to be used just like the the way you use web flow like through the web flow designer. Um just um headless CMS definition head of until they stop maintaining it. Uh if you're valid makes sense API you get API structure content model freedom do what you want but websites aren't just developer see visual tools offer a faster path but teams don't often feel forced between control and velocity web is a hybrid approach and visual first CMS that might yeah so it's it's the interface that you already know and love that you naturally use and they're just revealing that through so I just I just don't I'm struggling to understand what the differences because as a developer it doesn't change anything like no one's going to use this headless CMS on its own. It's all it's it's most likely going to already be part of a website. So I just exactly I just I I'm sorry Web Flow. What are you talking about? So why a hybrid CMS works better? They have it here. But this always existed is my point. This has existed since the first Web Flow API. There's nothing new here. Yes. What they are trying to do is like convince you why you shouldn't use a headless CMS because you have to maintain it. Okay. It's kind of like that that's the point that I got across. Sure. But why would you pay all that money? Like where's the pricing comparison between using Contentful and Web Flow? I mean they should have. Is there a pricing comparison anyway? No, because like what? Okay, let's take is is quite expensive to be honest. So, um maybe it is cheaper to literally just buy a web flow um buy a web flow thing. $300 a month. Free forever, 10 users, two rolls, um 50 gig. So, free is pretty generous, but then it goes way up. This is Contentful, by the way. Um yeah, but this is this is pretty good. Like uh this is live collaboration doesn't exist in the free version. Mhm. Okay. Commenting doesn't ex sc you can't schedule. Okay. So you're pushed towards the light version which is quite expensive. Yeah. Contentful is definitely for like big teams and with big Yeah. CMS requirements. I'm literally asking comet AI why would I use this over Contentful on the flow. Um, you also have Sitecore. Do you know Sitecore? Yeah, Sitecore is a a that's like WordPress basically, but they offer a headless solution. So the pricing here, I don't even see a pricing when they don't have this. It's like, oh, okay. It's just 100K. Yeah. Like starting at 100K. Exactly. And businesses think they're paying they're pay they're paying for the SLA. They're not paying for the technology. They're paying for the the 100% uptime and this and that and the other. There we go. If you look at this diagram as uh also we have the web flow designer and then you can do the you can use the API to have your web app and you have your web flow cloud and you can have that you know mixed with your web flow project. So maybe they are like going this direction at least like marketing it because they want to market uh they want to advertise it to this type of people who people who would bring their web app to web flow cloud as well as their marketing they're like marketing website and this could make sense to them. I mean if you bring your web app to web flow cloud you you already have your website on web flow probably so there is no point at saying oh don't use contentful use. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like unless they release this as a separate little thing, there's just no point in using this unless you've got a Web Flow website already and you're already using Web Flow because no one's going to be like, "Let's just buy Web Flow" but only access the a the API because that's what truly headless that's what headless CMS is, Web Flow. You've got your terminology wrong here. But if you've got the interface and all that, then you might as well use it, right? Yeah. Weird weird approach. So, it's not a new tool, but just to be clear, this is not a new tool. This isn't something new that's been released at all. This has always been the case. This is just a marketing tactic to try and maybe capture some developers who didn't know that you could do this with Web Flow. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.