> 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.
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.
Why might I use this instead of / in addition to Shadow (https://shadow.tech)? I'm a Shadow user, and they seem to give you beefier hardware at half the price, and it's a general purpose OS that will let you run any app (as opposed to "just" a browser).
Most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame two desktop experiences. The primary application people think is slow is their browser by a wide margin so that's where we decided to focus as more native desktop apps become web apps. That focus lets us constrain the problems we get solve vs boiling the ocean with all of Windows.
Fwiw, we started by streaming Windows and pivoted away.
It's not clear to me that Shadow's business is sustainable. Windows licensing alone for virtualization across end-users if you buy from a reseller is $11/mo/user alone. I only know because we tried and became a reseller briefly. They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements. Maybe they know something we don't.
> They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements
They claim to, in reality they are sliced Quadro/Tesla cards that get a GTX 1080's worth of performance. I was wondering about the Windows licensing myself, not clear how they got around that.
Perhaps the rotate (?) the licenses somehow? That is, not every subscriber is active all the time? Imagine it as the public computers at the library. Maybe?
In any case, even at $20 p/m it feels like a strong value. That ~$1000 every four years - without ever being stuck with an out of date machine.
Yep, this is exactly what I was getting at. Shadow is one of many examples of application streaming services which aren't limited to the browser and offer similar hardware (or even flexible hardware) at a lower price point.
+1 I love their service, it's flawless and I often forget I'm using a stream. Then again, I'm on a wired Ethernet connection and a fiber line within 5ms of the datacenter so that probably helps.
What's actually crazy is that i even ditched my Ethernet cable and is running on a ubiquiti amplfi 5ghz router, and there is seemingly no difference in my location at least.
Isn't Shadow basically going out of business? Pre-orders aren't estimated to be available until October and I thought I read somewhere that they are selling off pieces of the business.
There are 2 competing offers to buy the company, as I know of. One from OVH founder Octave Klaba, the other from JB Kempf, of VLC fame. So no, I don't think it should go out of business - in the short term.
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.