Webflow is all grown up! Webflow Conf 2026 Recap

The 2026 Webflow Conference was last week and here are my thoughts. First, I want to talk about how does this year compare to other years of the Webflow conference. I've been in the Webflow space since 2019 and I went to the very first Webflow conference which was actually called the No Code Conference. That conference was awesome and there was a great energy in the air around all the people that were building and wanting to just work together.

I even told my wife, I'm not really sure what's happening or why, but I need to go to this conference. I think it's going to be really good for my career. It's going to be really important and I was building websites in WordPress at the time, but this was a really new thing and everybody was excited to be there. So, I'm really glad I went and it definitely changed my career. One of the main things that I learned was that Webflow was the hub that everything else sort of revolved around.

And that was true both from a technical standpoint and also from a marketing and community standpoint. that Webflow was the centerpiece and they were giving back and investing in the community and all the other tools were kind of plugging their data into that and kind of growing as Webflow grew. That was the first conference, but things have changed quite a bit since then and I think the community has changed and grown as well.

In some ways, I think that early version of Webflow is what people are trying to compare Webflow to now, and they wish that we could go back in time to a smaller, more close-knit community that's more developer-centric. I miss those days, too. But I think we've grown and changed quite a bit since then. And I don't think it's fair to compare Webflow now to that version of 2019. I'm not going to recap every single conference, but I will say the conference last year to me did feel like a miss.

There were a number of things on stage that I just wasn't excited about. I think the product that had the AI builder right inside Webflow really has not been well-received. And the year before last, I think there was a general feeling that Webflow was pivoting to be too much focused on the enterprise customer. So, I'm not going to recap every single year, but I will say the 2024 conference, I came away feeling like Webflow has shifted a little bit too much to focus on enterprise.

And then in 2025, it felt like a pretty big product miss with some of their AI releases. This year, in 2026, I think they're moving in a really good direction. It seemed to me that the product team really wanted to hear our feedback as developers in ways that they hadn't in years past. I was able to come the day before for the partner summit and I was actually the first person in the room that day.

I think overall the vibes were really good. People were excited, but there was some reservation just because there's a lot of things we don't know. So, I'll talk about that in a minute. I kind of alluded to this, but Webflow is growing up. They're no longer the scrappy builders in the no code space, and we're no longer such a tight-knit community of friends like we used to be, which is sad. And it doesn't really feel like you can get to know everybody in the community the same way that we used to when it was just Vlad and Maguire doing the videos.

It was a little different back then. We've all changed and it's not the same community it used to be. Webflow is certainly moving up the market and chasing more enterprise and more marketing teams, but I think that's okay. The low end of the market is what we would call like the hobbyists and the small business. And those people are now just going directly to AI and just building something right in HTML.

They don't even need the full stack of Webflow. They don't even need the CMS. They don't need the hosting. They don't need any of that. And $25 or $30 a month is actually quite a lot for a product for a business like that. So to me, it makes sense that you don't want to spend a ton of effort chasing the lowest dollars. the higher end of the market, which is more towards the enterprise side of things, they move a little bit slower and they pay more, of course, but they definitely need more guidance.

That's one of the other things I've noticed is that there's a lot of cutting edge new AI that everyone wants to use right away. But a lot of these enterprise customers are not adopting that because it moves too quick for them. They need time for regulations to catch up. They need time for the stacks to mature before they're willing to trust brand new products like that. So, the low end of the market is louder.

They don't pay as much, and they move faster. where the high end of the market pays more, needs more guidance, and wants to work with a trusted platform like Webflow. If you're just a pure builder who's used to build in HTML or used to build right on Webflow, you might not quite see this new tool, Source, is super valuable, but I definitely see it and I think it's a smart move for Webflow. So, let's talk about the specifics of Source.

It's called Source by Webflow, and it's not replacing Webflow as we know it. They were very clear about that. They've told us that there's going to be the webflow.com builds and then the Source tool that you can bring your Webflow project into if you want to use more additional agent features. What I understand is it's going to be a one-way conversion so that you bring your Webflow project over and then you would use it in Source from then on.

It sounds like they're going to keep everything exactly the same for people who want their sites on webflow.com and they've committed that it's never going to break. This video is not really going to be about what Source is. I'm sure we'll get more of that later and we actually don't have a ton of details. So, watch the launch video and you can see what we're talking about. I really like this direction because my clients right now are building Jenga stacks that are super fragmented with all their different marketing tools.

People don't know where the data lives or how to get to it or how to use it most importantly. So, I'm really excited about this idea of a centralized marketing brain that everything can live in and that we can work with AI all in one place. Honestly, it reminds me of Grok Bot, which is one of my new favorite tools. It really works well because the agents have their own job and you can talk to them easily and they can do what they say they're going to do.

You could just tell them to do things without having to code everything by yourself. I think Source could be a great tool because it reminds people of things that are familiar to them like Slack where you talk to your bots already or Claude desktop where you have your AI threads. It sounds like it's also going to be seamlessly connected to almost every part of your website. Analytics, AB testing, design, development, copywriting, all those marketing tools that modern marketers want and want to use AI to talk to.

I also love the modularity of their new system. It sounds like they're kind of splitting out the product and focusing on each piece individually. So you have the Webflow Cloud, you have the Webflow designer, you have the CMS system, all the backend pieces together and then of course optimize and analyze and the other pieces of the product. It sounds great to be able to use certain pieces if you want and not have to use other pieces.

So some people might not need the Webflow CMS. They might have all their content in some other database like Sanity or they might only want the Webflow CMS if they want to put their data into their product itself. if they want to bring some data from the marketing database into their product, for example. Overall, it sounds like you're going to be able to use whatever parts of Webflow that you love and leave behind what you don't.

For Source, I think we all have a couple of big questions, and for me, I think the pricing is the biggest question mark. And I think I'll go so far as to say it'll make it or break it whether this is viable for clients. If the per token cost is too high and I can't have a good conversation or if I run out of tokens in a single day when it's supposed to last me a whole month, that's going to be a huge problem and it would make it impossible for me to recommend to my clients.

I'm also curious about the different pieces. If we have to pay for Source and Webflow Cloud and Webflow CMS and Webflow Optimize, if all those things are different costs, then that might be a problem as well. And it might be death by a thousand cuts. I'd love to know if I can bring my own models or if I'm always going to have to use the Webflow Cloud AI, especially if I want to have different writing styles or different design styles that each model is better or worse at.

Of course, everyone wants to know how soon can I get my hands on this? How soon can we start rolling it out to clients? So, that execution is going to be pretty important as well. I can definitely see clients wanting to go all-in on this stack since it does seem to work together so well and I just hope that that cost is somewhat manageable as well. My overall verdict for this conference is thumbs up.

Again, I think Webflow has already been solving these problems. How marketers and developers can work together, how to give everyone development superpowers and I think with Source hopefully we'll see that everyone can have marketing superpowers as well. It sounds like a game changer for marketers to be able to bring in their entire stack and work with their websites all while talking to AI. that right now is a huge mess and you have to know a lot of technical things to even make that work.

Right now all those different stacks are pretty disconnected and I would still argue you have to have a pretty good technical base to bring it all together and to ask the right questions of AI even if the AI can do the connecting work. Source by Webflow is a really cool vision, but let's see if they can make it work.