Platform arguments tend to generate more heat than they deserve. Most of the popular options are capable of producing a good website, and the choice matters far less than the thinking that goes into the site itself. That said, the wrong platform makes everyday work harder for years, so it's worth a proper decision rather than a default.
Start with how your team publishes
The most useful question is not which platform is best. It's what your team will need to do on a Tuesday afternoon in eighteen months, and whether they'll manage it without picking up the phone.
If someone in marketing needs to add a case study, change a price, or publish an event, how often does that happen and how technical are they? A team publishing weekly needs something quite different from one that updates a few pages a year.
Ask the people who will actually use it, not the person signing off the project. They are often different people, and the gap between what one assumes and the other experiences is where most platform regret comes from.
What each option is good at
WordPress remains the most widely understood option, with the largest pool of people who can maintain it. That matters more than it sounds. If we get hit by a bus, you can find someone else. The trade-off is that it needs looking after, and a neglected WordPress site becomes a security problem.
Webflow is excellent for marketing sites with a small number of editors who want visual control. It's less comfortable when the site needs deep integrations or a complicated content model, and you're renting the platform rather than owning the stack.
Framer has become very good for design-led marketing sites and is very fast to iterate on. It suits a company that wants to make frequent visual changes without a developer, and suits a large multi-audience site less well.
A custom build on a headless CMS gives the most control over performance, structure and integrations. It costs more up front and needs a developer relationship you can rely on. For a complex site with real integration requirements, it usually pays back.
The questions that actually narrow it down
What does the site have to connect to? A CRM, a booking system, an ERP, a payment provider. Integration requirements eliminate more options than anything else, and they are usually discovered too late.
How many people edit, and what happens when they make a mistake? A platform where an editor can accidentally break a layout is a platform that generates support calls.
Who owns it if the relationship ends? Slightly awkward to ask, and worth asking anyway. You should be able to leave any supplier and take the site with you.
What is the realistic maintenance budget? A platform that assumes ongoing developer time is the wrong choice for a company that hasn't got any.
Things that matter less than people think
Raw speed comparisons between platforms are mostly noise at this point. A well-built site on any of them will be fast enough; a badly built site on the fastest platform will not.
The same goes for the argument about which is better for SEO. All of them can produce clean, crawlable, well-structured HTML. What affects your ranking is the content, the structure and whether anyone links to you, none of which the platform decides.
Popularity is a weak signal too. The most widely used option is not automatically right for your situation, and neither is the newest.
How we choose on a project
We do not decide until we have mapped the content model and the integrations, which usually happens two or three weeks in. Choosing before that is guessing, however experienced the guess.
Then we write down the trade-offs plainly, including the ones that count against our recommendation, and you make the call. It's your site to live with.
And if the honest answer is that your existing platform is fine and the problem sits elsewhere, that's worth hearing too. Replacing a working CMS is an expensive way to solve a content problem.
A shortcut, if you want one
If you want the quick version: a marketing site with a handful of editors and no unusual integrations will be well served by Webflow or Framer. A content-heavy site with several publishers and a long life ahead of it is usually better on WordPress or a headless CMS.
A site with real integration requirements, a complicated content model, or performance demands beyond the ordinary, is where a custom build earns its cost. Below that threshold, custom is usually over-engineering.
That shortcut will be right most of the time and wrong occasionally, which is why we still map the requirements before committing. But if you're trying to sanity-check a recommendation someone has already given you, it's a reasonable place to start.
One last thing. Whichever you choose, ask who holds the accounts, where the code lives, and how you would move if you needed to. A supplier who answers those three questions comfortably is telling you something useful about how the relationship will go.