Webflow Conf 2025 Reaction: Just hype or actually useful?

Webflow Conf 2025 has once again announced a ton of new features — from AI code generation and code components to an entirely new CMS.
But let’s be honest: are these real game changers or just marketing hype?
As a Webflow power user, I’m taking a close look at the updates to see if there are actually useful real-world use casesbehind them.

In this video, you’ll get:

✅ My honest reaction to Webflow Conf 2025
✅ Concrete examples of the new features (AI, apps, components, CMS APIs)
✅ A clear verdict on what’s truly useful vs. what’s just show
✅ Tips on how you can start using these updates in your own projects right away

Webflow Conf 2025: Just hype or actually useful?

I want to give you examples and insights so you actually understand what you can do with these new updates, and what they really mean for you and Webflow going forward.

So this video is definitely worth your time if you want to go a bit deeper and not just hear the announcements.

Let’s dive right into the biggest topic: AI. It was clear right from the start that Webflow really pushed this direction during the conference. AI is now much more integrated into the core product – and it was presented in a way to impress especially marketers and enterprise customers.

But honestly: for me, it sometimes felt a bit too much like lets say buzzword bingo. The speakers loaded their intros with words like Bold Design, AI, Next Gen, Personalized, Scale, and so on. At times it felt scripted, artificial, and didn’t add much value. I would have preferred if they had gotten to the real, useful updates faster instead of circling around with big phrases.

That’s why I decided to structure this recap in my own order: starting with the updates that I think bring the most value.

Topic 1: AI

Webflow kicked off with AI, and I also see this as the biggest area of value. Not necessarily the way they presented it on stage, but more when you think a step further.

The AI Assistant has been completely overhauled. Soon you’ll be able to activate it directly from a toggle in the Designer navigation. Personally, I thought the use case they showed first was pretty weak compared to what followed. They demonstrated creating a new section with AI. But the far more exciting part is that the Assistant now understands your entire site structure, your styles, your variables, and your CMS. That’s huge!

And that’s exactly the key point for me. The old Assistant never really adapted to my personal workflow. If this new version truly understands how I work, the naming conventions I use, and how I structure elements – then it gets really interesting.

In the live demo you could see how risky AI demos can be. The result was rather “meh,” and the audience wasn’t blown away either. But the core idea is solid: working faster while still keeping control of your design. The new AI Assistant is set to roll out later this year.

For me though, the real value is not in letting AI build new feature sections – I actually enjoy doing that myself. The Assistant should help me with the boring, time-consuming tasks: generating alt texts, writing meta descriptions, or creating schema markup for SEO. And that’s exactly what it can do now.

In the Audit Panel, you can now step through each page while Webflow AI scans your content and suggests optimizations. Super useful.

There’s also a new field coming in Page Settings where you can automatically generate schema markup.

This is especially important for something called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) – a term I hadn’t heard before. AEO basically means optimizing your content so it shows up not only in search engines, but also in AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google AI Overviews.

Until now, many people manually added schema code themselves. Having this built into Webflow saves a ton of time.

Another update is access via the MCP server, which now includes Webflow Designer functions. Developers can directly interact with projects, update CMS content, rename assets, or even rebuild entire sections. What’s new is that much of this can now also be triggered directly inside the Designer through the AI Assistant.

And here’s where it gets really exciting: AI is most valuable when it helps me build things I couldn’t code myself. The back-and-forth copy-paste from an AI chat into Webflow has always been a pain – but that’s now happening more and more natively inside Webflow.

You can literally create full Web Apps from a single prompt, running on Webflow Cloud. Webflow showed an example with an interactive calendar – a full-year calendar with detail pages and the option to add events to Google Calendar.

These are exactly the kinds of features that, as an agency, you couldn’t just casually offer before. Now you can build them directly in Webflow as a one-person show. That means: real added value for your clients and new revenue opportunities for you.

Under the hood, this all runs on Astro, a framework that’s become very popular in the developer community. According to Astro’s official blog, Webflow donated $150,000 to support the open source project and is now an official partner.

The Assistant can also generate React Components that you can visually edit inside the Designer and store as Code Components.

It’ll be interesting to see how customizable these become in practice.

These AI features are scheduled to roll out early next year – with early access available now.

Examples of what you can build with Code Components or Web Apps

• Location Finder with map & filters
• AI builds: search bar, geo lookup, map pins, and opening hours. All powered by CMS data. For clients with multiple locations this is a huge value – fully in the Webflow look & feel.
• Dynamic charts and dashboards
• Bar or line charts pulling live data from the CMS. Perfect for storytelling with data directly on your site without external embeds.
• Product configurator as a React Component
• Variants like color or size, live prices, image switching – all in a reusable component. Checkout, for example, via Stripe.
• Multi-step forms with logic
• Input fields, progress indicators, validation, and clean CRM handoff. Features that really improve conversion rates.
• Job board with application flow
• Listings and detail pages, filters, CV upload, confirmation emails. All managed in the CMS, with applications landing in your CRM.
• Course or program catalog
• Filter by location, price, or level, with waitlist and invoice export. All manageable via the CMS.
• Booking system for rentals or accommodations

Topic 2: Next-Gen CMS

The second big block is the Next-Gen CMS.

For me, this might actually be the most important announcement after AI, because the CMS is the foundation of pretty much every site I build.

Webflow has rebuilt the CMS from the ground up. The goal: more flexibility, more scalability, and better performance– especially for larger projects.

Until now, the CMS was often the bottleneck as projects grew. Large datasets, complex relations, or nested structures often slowed everything down or hurt the Designer experience. And long-standing frustrations like nested collection limits were always an issue.

Key improvements:

• Custom storage & data modeling
• Enterprise sites can now scale up to 1 million CMS items. Double the fields per collection, double the reference fields – much more complex data models are now possible.
• More design flexibility
• For all users: up to 40 collection lists per page, up to 10 nested lists per page, and up to 100 items per nested list. Plus multi-level nesting up to three levels deep – which was previously unthinkable in Webflow.
• High performance & reliability
• Publishing, backups, and restores are now much faster and more stable, even on very large projects.
• Scalable multi-channel content delivery
• The new Content Delivery APIs are now available to all users. Meaning you can serve CMS content not only on your Webflow site, but also headlessly in apps, landing pages, or other platforms.

Example use cases:

• CMS content powering screens in stores, trade shows, or offices.
• Product updates in a shop instantly pushed to digital displays as soon as they change in the CMS.
• Multi-site publishing: one content set served across multiple websites or microsites.
• CMS content flowing automatically into newsletters, chatbots, or social automations.

My take:

Webflow had already promised at Conf 2024 that CMS limits and nested collection limits would be lifted by the end of that year. But honestly, not much happened. My guess is they realized they needed to rebuild the CMS completely to do it right. And that’s exactly what they did now.

It will also be interesting to see if Webflow eventually does the same with the Designer – moving away from older structures and maybe building a fully modern version.

For me personally this is huge, because I use the CMS in almost every project. That’s why this update comes right after AI in importance. I think it’s great Webflow tackled the CMS so thoroughly.

What I did miss though: they talked a lot about the new limits and scaling, but didn’t really show what it looks like in the Designer. Are there new fields? New query options? Native filters? Better ways to build with data? That’s what I was hoping for, but we didn’t see it.

Still – this is a massive step forward. For agencies and businesses, it means larger, more complex, multi-channel projects are now realistic in Webflow. Rollout is planned for later this year.

Topic 3: Component Canvas

Another really useful update is the Component Canvas.

Until now, you could only edit components by placing them on a page and tweaking them there. Now you get a dedicated canvas – similar to Figma or Framer – where you can see different component variants side by side and edit them independently from any page.

For design systems, this is huge. It gives you a much better overview and lets you focus on refining a component without distractions.

Personally, I used to hack around this by creating a hidden page where I’d place all my components just to keep them organized and easier to edit. Even hidden navigation elements were easier that way.

With the Component Canvas, this workflow is finally built right into Webflow – and I’m really looking forward to it.

Topic 4: GSAP Interactions

Next up: Interactions with GSAP.

This is an area I was really excited about because I’ve been working a lot with interactions and GSAP animations in the past months.

And on a personal note – Webflow even featured one of my projects during the conference: my NOVA Mars Project. That was a really cool moment, seeing my work showcased on such a big stage.

If you’d like to check it out or even clone it for free, the link is in the description.

Now, what’s new with GSAP: Webflow announced breakpoint-specific animations. Meaning you can show different animations on mobile versus desktop. Finally, true device-specific control.

They also added more granular options to exclude animations. For example, if you set all images on a page to fade in, you can now exclude certain pages entirely. Super handy when you want cleaner pages without motion.

A big one for me is accessibility. Webflow now respects system settings like Reduced Motion. If users prefer fewer animations, Webflow will automatically disable them. GSAP already supported this natively, but now you can configure it directly in the Interactions Panel.

All of this makes it more appealing for developers to use Webflow’s visual interface for animations instead of writing custom GSAP code. Complex scroll animations and interactions can now be built faster, visually, and without code.

And as a bonus: Webflow announced an upcoming LottieFiles integration for even more advanced animations later this year.

Topic 5: Real-time Collaboration

Another big one: Real-time Collaboration.

Until now, only one person could actively work in the Designer. If someone else tried to join, they’d get the dreaded message: “The Designer is currently occupied.” That was a huge bottleneck for teams.

With this update, multiple people can now work in Webflow simultaneously – in true real time. Just like in Google Docs, you can collaborate with teammates or clients, editing pages, content, and layouts together.

That means: no more handovers, no waiting, and fewer messy feedback loops. For agencies and bigger teams, this is a massive productivity boost.

It’s currently in private beta, but is expected to roll out to all customers later this year.

By the way, I watched the event together with some folks from the German Webflow community in Berlin. A few had already tested the feature and said it works surprisingly well – they had eight people in the same project without any issues.

The only downside: you can’t yet see each other’s cursors like you can in Figma.

Topic 6: Comment-only Links

Another very practical update: Comment-only Links.

Until now, clients or stakeholders needed a Webflow account to leave feedback directly in a project. For many, that was an unnecessary barrier, and in the end, feedback often came back as screenshots via email.

Now you can simply send a comment-only link. Anyone with the link can open the site and leave comments directly – no login required.

This saves a ton of time and makes collaboration with clients much smoother. Feedback lands exactly where it belongs: right on the design.

This feature is rolling out later this year.

Topic 7: Form Updates

Forms also got some nice improvements.

You can now configure notifications per form individually. Each form can have its own recipients and notification emails – super helpful when you have multiple forms on a site, like contact, newsletter, and job application.

There’s also a new Spam Inbox. Suspicious submissions land there, and you can review, restore, or delete them. That gives you much more control over your form data.

Topic 8: Webflow Analyze

Webflow Analyze also got updates. Previously, you could already see clicks and scroll behavior directly in the Designer. Now you also get Goal Tracking – conversion goals you can measure right inside Webflow.

And here’s something new: you can now track how much traffic is coming from AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. For the first time, you get actual insight into how these channels affect your site’s traffic.

Personally, I still think Webflow Analyze would benefit from a free, simplified version – just so more customers can see how valuable these analytics are right inside the Designer. But let’s see how it evolves.