In defense of Elementor vs. Webflow

WordPress product pricing is too cheap.

Elementor, the most popular page builder for WordPress these days, has announced a price hike which will come into effect on March 9, 2021.

Comments are as you expected:

Are you freaking kidding me? You guys are hugely successful which means you already make a pleasant amount of cash monthly/yearly but still, this is not enough, you need to charge (A LOT!) more money from your loyal customers!? Are you that greedy?Angry customer 1

I loved Elementor PRO, but $999 instead of $199 is a complete dealbreaker!Angry customer 2

Crazy! Your products are very good, but your operation is very bad. Angry customer 3

Elementor is no longer competing with "WordPress," they're going after the biggest bully in the room, Webflow.

Elementor vs Webflow

Elementor vs Gutenberg is a zero-sum game.

Listen to my recent episode with Matt Mullenweg to get his opinion on Jetpack vs. the world for more clarity. Why compete against an ecosystem that harvests low-price offerings and a general feeling of: I can do this for free?

#nocode is a massive movement right now. Coding tools that put the power back into the hands of — well — people like me. Savvy enough to know how web technology comes together, but not smart enough to actually learn how to code.

If you're looking for a product that makes coding a site easy to sell to clients + does the hosting + gives you a billing portal to earn your cut, Webflow is hard to beat. Note: I didn't say it's cheapest way to do all of this, that's the rub.

If I'm Elementor, that's the market I go after. Gutenberg + Jetpack are going to dominate the free/low-cost offering in a year's time. Gutenberg + Full-site Editing inside of free WordPress, is a mass market play into laying the monetization ground work for Jetpack.

Elementor is smart for keeping the beta tag on their cloud offering, too. They're going to build this plane while it's in flight. More on that later.

Elementor Pricing vs Webflow pricing

Elementor old/current pricing:

Elementor new/current pricing:

Webflow site plan pricing:

Webflow account plan pricing:

Webflow team plan pricing:

Webflow ecommerce pricing:

Holy shit, right?

Lets jump on the big Elementor elephant in the room first: $999 for 1,000 sites

At the current price of $199/year Elementor is an absolute STEAL. So when people do back of the napkin math, a 5x increase seems cray, "How could you charge that?!" they shout.

Proper messaging and optics aside as it looks like they fumbled that ball, it's not as bad when the dust settles somewhere near Webflow's corner of the web. The $999/year for 1,000 websites seems like chicken feed when you peel back the curtain of Webflow's free account.

Webflow Teams feature pricing

Allow me to present one pricing model out of this jumble of pricing grids above. I'd say anyone buying into $999/year for Elementor is probably a boutique agency, comprised of:

Agency ownerProject manager1 Designer2 DevelopersCustomer support rep

At least, this was how my agency was configured when I lead it day-to-day. Team plans are charged at $42/per user per month, arguably one of this biggest benefits to using Webflow is to centralize your agencies work all into one platfo