Webflow 3.0 is Insane

All right. So, Webflow Conf just happened and by the looks of it, you see I was in a watch party and we got a lot of announcement and we are going to go through everything and tell you things that you probably missed out from the live or like from other videos. So, command AI two big things happened. Web flow is reinventing itself by killing itself in a way. So the old web flow with the designer that we know that got some updates. But the biggest most exciting update is what they are doing next which is a new software a desktop app called source. You can open a web flow site. So a website that you already have on the I'm calling it old web flow or web flow designer. You can open that. You can start a new project from scratch using AI obviously. They start by entering by uh loading a Nex.js project into it all locally and then they ask the AI to basically run they will run the server. They they open up the project inside of source. And here you already see a bunch of things. I I'll go through them one by one. But you have your brand, you have your components. So basically these are the pieces of your project that you see. But the most interesting part something that gave us a wow and I don't know how much of that is real but they ask it to create a variation a more dynamic variation of the hero section and it does in a canvas and then you choose the picker and then you have these UIs that are being generated on the fly by the AI to tweak the AI generated uh UI and effects whatever. ever you you have but this is not like web flow where is the you know old web flow designer here it is so you can actually interact with the elements on the canvas you can directly change the text or change the styling or dive deep into the code and literally code because this is a project that you can load from any GitHub that you have or push back you know your updates to the main or deploy to web flow cloud. So this is kind of like in the first glance the whole gist of what it can do. You have other tools in it as well. This one it's called assets. This is like the the Figma tool. We reaver what's it called? Vaver uh or something like that. you have this nodebased system where you can generate assets like this is a part of web flow offering I guess now as you see here you have your projects you have your views you have like campaigns and projects but you also have agents so what's an agent so here they have like these different personas in a way so you have your context agent you have your channel assets you have uh QA agent, I guess you have life cycle. So you have like these different types of agents with different levels of access and they might connect to Slack, they might connect to Google Docs and these connect to your website and basically can manage your website. So maybe this is the most interesting part of all is the nextG CMS. And when I say nextg, it does look like a proper modern like completely revamped, completely headless nextg CMS where you have here your content, you have your pages and here for example you have the blog but they also quickly showed the homepage. You have these concepts of blocks and basically you're feeding your pages with the data from the CMS. And I'm not just talking about like collection pages. That's like collection pages and collection items the way they existed in the old web flow. No, like in a modern way you want to have like these different blocks the content of which is coming from the CMS and you can basically create any structure that you want with any sort of like templatization and that's seems like to be exactly that they they also show that you can preview this and that was the basically the highlight of this for me. You obviously have things like activity and you see like a human doing something or an agent doing something. This is really helpful especially for big clients. They want to have that level of uh control. Then they have this inbox thing. The inbox thing is kind of like the sessions that you have. you know, you do things in claude and cursor and chat GPT and you have your sessions and this to me it looks like that but it's kind of like different goals and tasks that humans or agents take on and you basically see okay uh this person is working on the site and this is an agent and this is I don't know like they have different icons I guess like the site has different things to work on for example analytics. So this is working on organic traffic or whatever. So you have these inbox and you can go through a team of people and agents in a way. But also you have now this granular control also on the canvas directly where you can click on any element and change the style or like these basic things that tools like lovable and ripplet also have. So they are adding that as well. So you don't necessarily need the CSS style panel. You can do things also directly on the canvas. You can access the layers the same way you are doing it in web flow but I guess in a more professional but still yet friendly way. You see the tags directly. In web flow you can't do this exactly. And obviously yeah the the style panel a bit modernized I would say. Then they showed us views and they talked about views a lot. So views are essentially pieces of um software in a way or like a combination of different tools like you can combine the data coming from Google Analytics with some what whatever else that you have and you create a view that's visualizing the work that you need to do or the information that you need to digest and that's about your site and running it and the campaigns that you have and so much more. And it looks really cool. It it looks like also they they mentioned you can get you can make these yourself install what web flow already gives you or there will be like a community where people can create these views and you can get views these views from different people. So obviously as as you've seen so far I don't have access to it yet but um you bet once we have access I will uh I I will show you more and everything. So that was basically source. This is the future of web flow. This is where they are going and to me it looks like this is how they want to transition. They never said that they are killing the old web flow, but I have a really hard time imagining the product actually being able to to survive this AI revolution or whatever you want to call it. Like I don't want to build in this way anymore. I don't want to deal with the CMS limitations in this way. It was good for 2019. It's not good for today. The problem is web flow are competing with free web flow designers now know how to build a website and host it on Versel. So that's their biggest competition right now for builders. But it doesn't seem like their presentation at all focused not at all next to nothing on the builders and those are the people that are going to later on sell to enterprises to you know it's got they've got to they've got to balance out that focus a little bit. So not mentioning the price will really make or break this product to be honest. Um otherwise there there is going to be a massive if you have to pay for this tool let alone actually using web flow once you've got the tool then there is going to be like a mass exodus of web flow designers cuz they just like I would it's so easy for me to just not use web flow why would I go to this I want to just mention that you're talking about us like small agencies and freelancers you're not talking But enterprise companies or like big big companies but no I am talking about those because the people that work for the enterprise companies need to yes the ones they've already got sure they'll move on to this and everything will be fine but they are going to put a complete stopper to new companies because no one's going to be building with web flow if it's a paid for tool and a paid for e you know whatever um even just a little bit of money I think people will just leave like people want to use the builders want to use web flow but if they have to pay something then they're going to be like h it's not worth it and so they are shooting themselves in the foot because new enterprise won't be able to find web flow developers who use this web flow there's just there's nothing attractive about this like that you just can't do elsewhere it holds their current audience it holds their current enterprise clients gives them something nice and new, but it does not it's not attracting new uh new prospects as it looks to me. Interesting. I feel like they they overstaffed this tool. It looks like that to me. It has way too many surfaces. Like it has views, CMS, assets. It's like so many things that I don't necessarily care about. I don't know if I care about all of these things. I don't want these features to block me from using the tool itself by all being all making the the product being like a paid or expensive product. I like the idea of having CMS and assets as like that tool to generate assets and brand and campaigns, but I want to have the option to not use any of these things and just use this with my own agent subs with my own open AAI and anthropic subscriptions that I got to use maybe some of their agentics. So like I I guess a lot of these are just MD files behind the scene. Correct me if I'm wrong, but like a lot of these I I would like to use the simple stuff first and then and then maybe I find brand useful or like campaigns useful and then I I buy it. Uh you know, maybe I can have a free trier, you know, I can try it and then buy it. I think that's where they can compete. If not, I find it to be honest really hard to I like I maybe if my client want to pay for this because it's nicer to them, that's fine. I wouldn't advise them against it, but I myself I'm already paying for claude and I'm pretty happy with the claw desktop app. And if I want a CMS, I add a CMS. If I want an asset generation tool, I mean, I've showed it in the show before. I can create one that does, you know, what I need the way I need it. So, it's a difficult time for software altogether because I can create the software that I need in the way that I need it. And as I've shown before, like with when it comes to creating the website itself, it's just becoming incredibly easy to do with things like Astro and just AI getting something really good up and running. But my initial feedback from watching this and understanding the tool is that Web Flow are still hellbent on creating an ecosystem that you cannot leave. Mhm. And it sounds like on the surface that they've made everything open and whatever. Again, when they announce the price, that'll be where we finally learn how how much they've let go of that ecosystem uh mindset. I think it's the wrong mindset is coming. I think it's coming across as greedy. Um, but that's not the way that they are going to compete because people like you have have discovered open source and what it means to be an open-source platform and to have inter interoperability. Let's see how much it costs. Who is going to use this tool? There was just so much that's gone. Marketers, there's so much that's gone into it. Like no one is going to be using the build and then jumping into the inbox and then you going into the analytics platform and then generating images like very few people are in that whole world and arguably marketers didn't need a tool. They they would they would much prefer prefer to probably work in the browser or through their agent. They didn't need to add that to source. I don't think that's where the primary use um you know if you were to look at the user data of who's using source I don't think they're going to be in those windows and those areas I really don't web flow this needed to be a tool for your builders no one else everyone else is is happy with their MCPs and logging into the website no one asked for any anything like this people wanted a new way to build this tool Let's see. Let's let's get access to it and I hope I can, you know, uh I can do something with it and it's not like, you know, too expensive or yet another subscription with or another blocker like a way to it gets in the way of building websites. Interestingly, we had a comment on one of our previous videos. Someone was very upset thinking we're thinks we're trying to we're trying to clickbait by on Web Flow. And I think I could I could not agree disagree sorry more that we want Web Flow to survive. We want Web Flow to do well you more than me. Obviously I have no use for Web Flow anymore. But you you you want we're not but it's it's we we have to call it out. We have to call it out as we see it. And I just don't think we're looking at a product that that will that will work. I mean, I might we might eat our words, but I I I really think I can't stop focusing on this price aspect. price will determine whether they're just being greedy and trying to lock continue down this ecosystem route or they want their builders to to have a nice shiny new tool with a bunch of like nice little extras that probably won't get used. But hopefully you'll be able to, you know, customize the interface and from a user user permissions perspective like someone in your team has only access to certain area, you know, certain elements and whatever of the app. So it cleans it up a bit. You don't need, sorry, your developer to be looking at the analytics of the website. You just don't need to show them that or whatever. Um, yeah, I want I want Web Flow. You want Web Flow to do well. You want We want better tools, particularly as you're still building Web Flow websites and still need to manage Web Flow websites. You want a tool that's going to be good because right now Web Flow as it stands is is slowing you down. It is that that that's the point. Yeah. The things that I'm building with web without web flow, I can't do them with web flow anymore. So I guess the biggest news was Timothy Ricks actually joining Webflow after it was also interesting he joined after he started to talk about Astro and building a tool for Astro and like a visual builder copying web flow essentially and now he's a part of the web flow team I guess working on some improvements from my understanding to the old web flow to the current web flow designer. What happens to Staki now? What happens to Lumos now? Listen, there were there were some conspiracies going on both in person and online. People saying, by the way, I genuinely have no idea if any of this is true, but there were talks about Webflow saw Timothy, the biggest creator. He's he was the not just the biggest creator, he was one of the last standing creators for web flow, right? He was teaching web flow people to not use web flow. He was showing us how great uh you know Astro is. He was literally like learning Astro. He was uh streaming his he was streaming himself learning Astro building with Astro. He built Stacky, a visual builder that was to me always like, "How is he not scared of Web Flow, you know, hitting him with a uh cease and desist or something because he was like literally copying the Web Flow UI." Uh anyway, so there were these conspiracies that because he was bringing people away from Web Flow, maybe Web Flow hired him entirely or partially to to to be like, "Put a stop on this." So, if you want to be hired, they bought his followers basically. They bought his reach. Yeah. They bought his Yeah. But yeah, but he's not going to do content uh on the web. No, I know that. I know that. But he he has fans that trust and follow him and his opinions. So they will in turn I mean there might be something in his I don't know what his contract looks like but there might be something in his contract to say you can't produce content or build I mean he well you say he had to close his his um community but that was the Patreon community. Yeah, it might be contract. I don't think that was a part of his contract because he replied uh to a comment saying that he didn't want the people to get charged for something that he's not sure uh continuing to develop and I do trust him by the way. It's a strange thing but I do trust. Hang on. Listen to what you've just said there. Like of course he doesn't want to charge people cuz he's not contributed but why isn't he contributing to it? He didn't lie, but he also didn't tell the truth. Maybe. No. No, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying like I don't know if I can trust Web Flow on that. So that's why I'm like maybe they they they actually maybe got him partially at least so he doesn't continue on that path of Yes. So it's it's a it's a semi non-disclosure agreement. It's say, "Look, we we if we if we hire you, you you got to stop. You have to talk about this because it's part of your contract." Exactly. And it's a standard, by the way. Yeah. Um because interesting, you know, that you know that LinkedIn post or tweet or whatever that went viral a few weeks ago. Yes. Do you think he would have written that if he had an upand cominging uh employment contract signed by Web Flow? It might give you an idea of how quickly this thing came about. At what stage in his journey of transitioning away this this might have happened and what was that two weeks ago? This may have literally come together in the last two weeks. I'm excited to use S source. I'm excited to use the new CMS. I mean we are really entering some strange time with software. So but what you can bet on is we will share all of our experience with you. 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. Command AI.