2 Hour MVP: Webflow vs. Bubble

At Founder + Lightning, we work with founders who are looking to bring something new and transformative to the market. We work with a range of founders, from those launching early-stage startups to existing businesses looking to digitise in order to scale. As part of that process, we’re always looking for new ways to launch MVPs and grow businesses faster — so of course, we love NoCode tools 🙌

I’ve been using Webflow on and off for about a year now, however, I’ve been hearing more and more founders using Bubble to build and launch their MVPs so decided it was time to give Bubble a try

TLDR Both gave the customer the same value as an output. In my opinion, Webflow gave me a higher quality product, visually. Bubble was intuitive and easy to set up with the super quick API integration and workflow builder but has a less polished finish. I was surprised by the time I had to spend looking up solutions on Webflow, despite having used it before.

The challenge

⏰ Time limit per platform: 2 hours
✏️ Brief: Create a web app to showcase the content we’ve been watching in fortnightly `Breakfast Lecture` events. These are all stored in Airtable with basic information attached: Title, Categories, Date Watched, URL. Select two similar tools and compare them
👮‍♂️Requirements:
- Must have: Use the first template offered by both tools
- Must have: Users can see and watch the most recent content from our Airtable list
- Should have: Users can see other content available from our Airtable list
- Could have: Users can sign up

Please note I have been using Webflow for a while — though somewhat sporadically! Plus I have one site that uses the Airtable API so had a basic understanding of how it works.

Bubble

👀 Check it out

How it works…

• The content is pulled dynamically from Airtable using the `External API Plugin`
• When users sign up their data is stored in the native database in Bubble
• Sign up buttons are hidden and video content is unlocked once the user logs in
• I tweaked the Airtable DB to fetch only ‘Watched’ content
• I grabbed an illustration from Blush for the hero image

Pros

✅ Pre-built user authentication — this was already implemented in the template, so I just needed to link the flow to the new signup buttons I added

✅ API access — I did have to play around with the Airtable API to get the results I wanted, but the external plugin worked well and meant I didn’t have to change my current content management system

✅ Didn’t have to research too much in order to get everything working — my time was spent on implementation and doing more rather than researching how to do things. Although I already understood workflows, the copy is clear so they’re pretty easy to understand

Cons

❌ Design — Their UI allows you to move elements pretty much anywhere on the page. This is probably great if you’re a designer but as someone who doesn’t have a great eye for spacing, padding, margins etc.. I’ve found it looks a bit clunky.

Webflow

👀 Check it out

How it works

• I had to migrate the content from Airtable into Webflow so that became the source of the content, not Airtable
• Webflow doesn’t (yet!) have a native method of allowing users to signup, so I’ve enabled this using Memberstack
• Sign up buttons are hidden and video content is unlocked once the user logs in
• I reused the hero image from Blush

Pros

✅ Design — Although I slightly altered their template to better meet my requirements, it still looks well laid out

✅ Content filtering — Once the content was in the CMS, selecting the content I wanted to be locked/unlocked was easy

Cons

❌ CMS integration and importing the data into Webflow felt quite time-consuming given that my database already existed in Airtable

❌ I had to pay to test my signup functionality — not ideal to pay before knowing it would work

❌ I spent much more time on the Webflow forums vs. Bubble — despite having more experience with Webflow

Summary

The value both ‘MVP’s give the user is the same. Webflow gave me a visually higher quality product and has many integrations that could be used to keep iterating on this in the future. I was surprised by the time I had to spend looking up solutions on Webflow, despite having used it before. Bubble was quite intuitive to set up — the template and workflow builder meant that most elements were in place from the start. I would want to spend more time on the design before I launched the Bubble version.

If you have any questions about starting your business using NoCode MVPs feel free to reach out!