Unlock the full potential of Framer, the design tool that’s revolutionizing the way designers and developers collaborate. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a complete beginner, this comprehensive guide dives deep into Framer’s game-changing features, from interactive prototyping to real-time collaboration. Get ready to elevate your design workflow to new heights!

Read further to learn more about Framer, in our review we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.

Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.

Framer is a website builder that allows users to design and publish websites without the need for coding. The platform offers a freeform canvas where users can add animations, interactions, and even integrate a Content Management System (CMS).

It is particularly useful for various types of users, from startups to freelancers, enabling them to build sites quickly and efficiently.

Framer also offers advanced features like localization, built-in analytics, and third-party plugins, making it a comprehensive tool for website creation. The platform emphasizes SEO optimization and performance, aiming to deliver websites that are both visually appealing and functionally robust.

Framer specifications

Navigate the perfect plan for your design needs with Framer’s flexible pricing options, ranging from $0 to $50 per month. Whether you’re a hobbyist looking for basic design functionalities or a large team in need of advanced features and analytics, Framer has a plan tailored just for you. Get started today and choose the package that fits your vision and budget!

Framer pricing plans

Free Plan:

• • Yearly billing: $0 per month per site
  • Features:
    • Design Editor: Basic design functionalities to create simple layouts.
    • Framer Banner: A banner indicating the site is built with Framer.

Mini Plan:

• • Yearly billing: $10 per month per site
  • Features:
    • Home + 404 Pages: Create a homepage and a 404 error page.
    • Custom Domain: Attach your own domain name.
    • 1k Visitors: Up to 1,000 visitors per month.

Basic Plan:

• • Yearly billing: $20 per month per site
  • Features:
    • Unlimited Pages: Create as many pages as you need.
    • Password Protection: Secure your site with a password.
    • 1 CMS Collection: Manage one set of dynamic content.
    • 10k Visitors: Up to 10,000 visitors per month.

Pro Plan:

• • Yearly billing: $40 per month per site
  • Features:
    • Analytics: Track user behavior and site performance.
    • Staging: Test your site before making it live.
    • 1 Translation Locale: Translate your site into one additional language.
    • 10 CMS Collections: Manage multiple sets of dynamic content.
    • 200k Visitors: Up to 200,000 visitors per month.

Enterprise Plan:

• • Custom pricing
  • Yearly billing only
  • Features:
    • Custom Limits: Tailored to your specific needs.
    • Reverse Proxy: Advanced networking options.
    • Premium Support: Priority customer service.

Team Pricing:

• • Team Basic: $25 per month per editor
    • Includes all features of the Basic Plan for multiple editors.
  • Team Pro: $50 per month per editor
    • Includes all features of the Pro Plan for multiple editors.

Pro Add-Ons:

• • Additional features like unlimited search, CMS upgrade, localization upgrade, and more are available as add-ons. These can be added to any plan to extend its capabilities.

In the ever-evolving landscape of web design and development, Framer stands out as a comprehensive tool equipped with a wide array of features. These features are designed to offer flexibility, control, and ease of use, catering to both novice designers and seasoned professionals.

From dynamic scroll animations to intricate component transitions, Framer provides the capabilities to create interactive and visually stunning websites. Below, we delve into each feature in detail to give you a better understanding of how Framer can elevate your web design projects.

Design and Layouts

Stack and Grid

Stacks and Grids are layout tools within Framer that help you organize your design elements efficiently. A Stack is essentially a container where you can place layers either vertically or horizontally, making it easier to manage spacing and alignment.

On the other hand, a Grid allows you to place layers in a two-dimensional pattern, offering more complex layout possibilities. Both of these tools are invaluable for creating responsive designs, as they automatically adjust to fit different screen sizes.

Freeform Canvas

The Freeform Canvas in Framer is a design space that offers you complete creative freedom. Unlike traditional design tools that confine you to certain layouts or box models, the Freeform Canvas lets you place elements wherever you like.

This is particularly useful for designers who want to break away from conventional design patterns and create something truly unique. The canvas is similar to other design tools like Adobe XD, Sketch, and Figma, offering a familiar interface for those who have used these platforms.

Figma Copy Paste

The Figma Copy Paste feature is a time-saving tool that allows you to directly transfer your designs from Figma into Framer. If you’ve already spent time creating a design in Figma, this feature eliminates the need to recreate it in Framer, allowing you to continue your work seamlessly. This is particularly beneficial for designers who work across multiple platforms or are transitioning from Figma to Framer for specific projects.

Breakpoints

Breakpoints are a crucial feature for anyone looking to create a responsive design. In Framer, you can set different breakpoints for various screen sizes, such as desktop, tablet, and mobile.

These breakpoints are displayed side by side on the canvas, allowing you to easily compare how your design will look on different devices. This feature speeds up the design process and ensures that your website will provide an optimal user experience regardless of the device used to access it.

Insert Pages and Sections

The Insert Pages and Sections feature allows you to add pre-designed templates into your project. These templates range from landing pages to portfolios and are minimally styled to serve as a starting point for your design.

They are fully customizable, enabling you to tweak them according to your creative vision. This feature is particularly useful for speeding up the initial stages of a project, allowing you to focus more on customization and less on building from scratch.

Pinning

Pinning is a layout feature that lets you “pin” elements to specific positions on your canvas. This is particularly useful for elements that you want to remain fixed as the user scrolls or resizes the browser.

You can pin elements within stacks and grids, offering a level of layout complexity that is both powerful and flexible. This feature is essential for creating dynamic, responsive designs.

Styling

Styling in Framer is incredibly versatile, offering a wide range of property controls. You can adjust fills, borders, and even apply filters to your layers.

The platform also offers realistically rendered shadows, adding depth to your designs. For consistency, you can use Text Styles and shared colors, ensuring that your design elements remain uniform across different pages or sections.

Positioning

Positioning is another layout feature that offers you the ability to fix elements like navigation bars, sidebars, and badges to specific locations on your canvas. This is particularly useful for creating sticky headers or footers that stay in place as the user scrolls. You can also use absolute positioning within stacks, allowing you to break the flow and place elements wherever you like.

Light and Dark Mode

Framer’s Light and Dark Mode feature allows you to create designs that are adaptable to different lighting conditions or user preferences. You can define these modes using Color Styles and then apply them throughout your project. This feature even extends to interactions and animations, offering a cohesive user experience.

Built-in Fonts

Framer offers a selection of built-in web fonts that you can use in your projects. If you prefer, you can also integrate Google Fonts and Fontshare, offering you a wide range of typography options. This feature ensures that you have all the resources you need to create visually appealing and readable designs.

Navigation

Links

Links in Framer offer a robust way to create seamless navigation throughout your website. You can turn any design element into a clickable link that directs users to different pages, sections, or even external websites.

The platform auto-fills these links with existing pages, ensuring that you always point to the correct destination. This feature is particularly useful for creating intuitive user journeys and improving the overall user experience.

Pages

Pages serve as the foundational building blocks of your website in Framer. You can easily create, rename, and move different parts of your site around. Each page has its unique path, making it simple to set up and organize. Whether you’re working on a single landing page or a complex, multi-page website, the Pages feature provides a straightforward way to manage and structure your content.

Scroll Sections

Scroll Sections in Framer allow you to mark any layer as a scrollable section. This feature enables you to link directly to these sections, even from outside the Framer environment. You can also choose the type of scroll behavior, such as instant scrolling or smooth animations. This adds another layer of interactivity and user engagement to your designs.

Redirects

The Redirects feature is essential for maintaining a clean and effective website structure. If you’ve changed the URL of a page or reorganized your site’s content, this feature helps you route traffic from the old path to the new URL. It’s particularly useful for preserving SEO rankings and avoiding 404 errors, ensuring that users can easily find what they’re looking for.

Overlays

Overlays in Framer allow you to add various elements to your web pages, such as video players, dialog boxes, and navigation bars. This feature enhances the functionality of your site, enabling you to create more interactive and dynamic pages. It’s a versatile tool that can be used for a wide range of design applications.

Link Styles

The Link Styles feature in Framer enables you to style all your website’s links in one go. You can set styles for different states, such as default, hover, and current page states. This feature streamlines the styling process, saving you time and ensuring a consistent and visually appealing design across all links on your site.

Site Search

The Site Search feature enhances your website’s user experience by providing a quick and efficient way to find content. You can simply drag and drop the Search component into your project, and thanks to Framer’s deep integration with multi-threaded optimization, your site gets indexed almost instantly. This means that the search function is ready to deliver results as soon as your site goes live.

SEO and Performance

Analytics

Framer’s Analytics feature offers a comprehensive tracking solution for your website. It comes with built-in analytics that are not affected by analytics blockers and are fully GDPR-compliant.

The platform also supports integrations with popular analytics services like Google Analytics, Segment, and HubSpot, which can be installed with just a single click. This feature provides you with valuable insights into user behavior, helping you make data-driven decisions to improve your website’s performance.

Metadata

The Metadata feature in Framer allows you to easily manage the title and description of your web pages for search engine optimization. You can input and manage the information that appears in search engine results, thereby improving your website’s visibility and ranking. This feature is particularly useful for those who want to enhance their SEO efforts without the need for additional tools or plugins.

Sitemap

Framer simplifies SEO optimization with its Sitemap feature. You can customize page URLs and titles with a single click, and the platform will automatically generate new sitemaps for you. Real-time updates ensure that search engines have access to the most current information, which in turn improves your website’s search visibility and drives more traffic to your site.

Semantics

Semantics in Framer allows you to use tags to structure and define the content on your website. This improves both the organization and readability of your site, making it easier for users and search engines to navigate.

Whether you’re building a simple landing page or a complex web application, using tags in Framer ensures that your content is well-organized and easily accessible.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a crucial aspect of web design, and Framer provides excellent tools to improve it. The platform allows you to add meaning to the elements on your site through features like Semantic and Frame Tags, Image ALT text, Tab order, ARIA label, and the Reduced Motion option. These tools make your website more accessible to a broader audience, including those with disabilities.

Lighthouse Scores

Framer websites are optimized to score well on Google Lighthouse, a tool that evaluates the quality of web pages based on various performance metrics. The platform uses the latest web technologies and optimization techniques to ensure fast loading times, efficient resource usage, and a great user experience. This results in high scores on key Lighthouse metrics like First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, and Time to Interactive.

Server-Side Rendering

Framer employs server-side rendering to pre-render every website as soon as you deploy it. This ensures that search engines can analyze your site without running any JavaScript, providing a significant speed boost that can improve your SEO rankings. The pre-rendered HTML is stored and sent to your visitors immediately upon request, resulting in faster load times.

Hosting

Framer’s built-in hosting feature offers a quick and efficient solution for deploying your website. The hosting infrastructure is robust, utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) and featuring CloudFront, S3, and multiple load-balanced frontends with large in-memory caches. This ensures that your website is accessible globally with optimal performance.

Site Management

Localization

Framer’s Localization feature is AI-powered and allows you to customize your website for different languages and regions. It supports localized text, images, and adaptive content specific to each locale.

The built-in AI Translation is optimized for website translation, ensuring that links, images, and CMS variables are preserved across languages. You can also use the Localization Table for a streamlined workflow or directly edit translations on the Canvas.

Project Permissions

Project Permissions in Framer offer granular access control for your projects. You can invite team members and assign them specific permissions like Design, Content, and Deploy. This level of control helps your team stay organized and minimizes the risk of accidental changes to your website.

Versions & Rollback

The Versions & Rollback feature provides a robust version control system for your deployed sites. Each deployment generates a unique link, making it easy to track different versions. You can also roll back to any previous deployment in seconds, allowing for quick issue resolution and ensuring a smooth workflow.

Publish

Framer’s Publish feature enables you to deploy your website instantly to either a Framer subdomain or a custom third-party domain. The platform boasts delivery speeds up to 300% faster than other platforms, ensuring that your projects are accessible to your audience without delay.

Custom Domain

The Custom Domain feature allows you to personalize your Framer projects with a unique domain name. This adds a level of professionalism to your projects and makes sharing them more straightforward.

Staging

Framer’s Staging feature provides a separate environment for testing and reviewing updates before they go live. This ensures that only thoroughly vetted and approved changes are deployed, reducing the risk of errors or unexpected behavior on the live site.

Optimization

Framer includes various performance optimization techniques, such as reducing page load times and using efficient code. These optimizations contribute to a better user experience and can positively impact SEO rankings.

Cookie Banner

The Cookie Banner feature integrates with Google Tag Manager to provide a complete cookie consent system. This is essential for compliance with privacy regulations and enhances user trust.

CMS features

Collections

Collections in Framer serve as a simple database that allows you to manage and display content on your website. You can use a variety of field types to collect and store items, which can then be referenced throughout your site. This feature offers you the flexibility to keep your website’s content fresh and relevant without altering its design.

CMS Pages

CMS Pages in Framer enable you to display various types of content like blog posts, job offers, or help articles. These pages act as templates, automatically applying the same structure and style to all generated pages. This ensures design consistency while allowing for quick content updates.

Collection List

The Collection List feature lets you display items from a CMS collection on any page. This is particularly useful for showcasing a collection of products, blog posts, or other content types. You can also use filters, limits, and offsets to display specific items, offering you greater control over what content is shown.

Limit & Offset

The Limit & Offset features allow you to control the number of items displayed from a CMS collection. Limits are useful for managing large amounts of content, improving site performance by reducing load times. Offsets let you choose the starting point for displaying items, offering additional flexibility in content presentation.

Field Types

Field Types give you the ability to set up various input fields based on your content needs. Whether you need text fields, date fields, or rich text fields, almost every styling option can be converted into a CMS field. This feature enhances the flexibility and customization of your content management.

Transforms

Transforms in Framer enable you to add prefixes or suffixes to text variables. This is useful for making global text changes, such as adding currency symbols or units of measurement. Transforms help you maintain consistency across your design without manual updates.

Filters

The Filters feature allows you to sort and filter content within a CMS collection based on specific criteria like date, author, or category. This makes it easier to display the exact content you need for different sections of your website.

Conditionals

Conditionals offer the ability to dynamically show or hide elements in your collection based on specific conditions. For example, you can display a ‘featured’ badge only when a CMS item is set as featured. This adds an extra layer of interactivity and customization to your website.

Effects

Scroll Animation

Scroll Animation in Framer enables you to create dynamic animations that are triggered as users scroll through your website. This feature allows layers to animate when they come into view or when another layer enters the viewport.

You can also set different transitions for when a layer enters and exits the viewport. This feature is particularly useful for creating unique experiences like parallax scrolling, enhancing user engagement and providing a more immersive experience.

Scroll Speed

The Scroll Speed feature allows you to control the scrolling speed of individual layers relative to the default page scroll. By adjusting the scroll speed, you can create effects like parallax and reveal, where selected layers scroll at a different speed compared to other elements on the page. This adds a layer of depth and dynamism to your website’s design.

Scroll Variant

Scroll Variants offer the ability to change the active variant of a component based on its position in the viewport. For example, you can use this feature to change the appearance of a navigation bar as the user scrolls down the page.

This could involve altering its background color or adjusting the positioning of its elements. Scroll Variants can also be used to highlight active sections in a sidebar as the user scrolls, adding an interactive layer to your website.

Components

Components in Framer allow you to create visual transitions between different variants of a component. You can easily set up hover and pressed states and build custom transitions using appear triggers and delays. This feature provides you with the tools to create interactive and visually appealing components that enhance the user experience.

Appear Animation

The Appear Animation feature enables you to animate any layer as the page loads. This feature offers easy customization options, allowing you to create animations that align with the overall look and feel of your website.

Whether you want a subtle fade-in effect or a more complex animation sequence, Appear Animation provides the flexibility to bring your creative vision to life.

Framer is a design and prototyping tool that bridges the gap between designers and developers. It offers a drag-and-drop interface for quick design mockups, as well as a code editor for more advanced functionalities.

Whether you’re a designer wanting to dabble in code or a developer interested in design, Framer has you covered. It’s particularly useful for creating highly interactive and dynamic user experiences, thanks to its robust set of features like component-based design, interactive prototyping, and real-time collaboration.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Ease of Use: Framer is user-friendly, making it accessible for both designers and developers.
• Interactive Prototyping: Allows for the creation of highly interactive and realistic prototypes.
• Component-based Design: Offers a modular approach, enhancing design consistency and reusability.
• Code Integration: Comes with a built-in code editor, allowing for custom interactions and animations.
• Collaboration: Supports real-time collaboration and version control, facilitating teamwork.
• Extensive Documentation: A wealth of online video guides makes learning Framer straightforward.

Cons:

• Limited CMS: While it does offer CMS features, they are not as extensive as those in Webflow or Bubble.
• Polish: Not as refined as other design tools like Figma or Adobe XD.
• Compatibility Issues: Some design elements may not transfer seamlessly from other design tools like Figma.
• Limited Video Documentation: Compared to other platforms, Framer’s video documentation is less comprehensive.

Given its capabilities and some limitations, Framer is best suited for those who want a balanced mix of design and coding in one platform.