Two open source visual builders, seen from the desk of people who sell websites, in an agency or as a freelance web designer: who builds, how the client edits, where it is hosted, what it costs per site, and what happens in five years.
2026-07-14
If you run an agency, a studio or a freelance practice, you are not choosing a website builder for one site. You are choosing a way of working for the next thirty client projects, most of them plugged into a CMS the client already uses or will learn: WordPress, Strapi, Directus, Supabase. The questions are practical. Who does the work, you alone or a team? How does the client update content without calling you? Where does the site live, and does the bill grow with the client's traffic? Can you reuse what you built for the last client? And if the tool disappears, what happens to the sites you delivered?
Silex and Webstudio are both visual builders released under the AGPL, and both let you design on real data from a headless CMS. We already published a step by step comparison, building the same CMS page in both tools: Silex vs Webstudio, side by side, with a seven minute video. This article does not repeat it. It looks at the same two tools from the point of view of a business that delivers sites to clients.
In both tools, the person designing pages works visually on real HTML and CSS, with classes, breakpoints and components. Neither tool asks a designer to write a React app. The difference shows when the design meets the data. In Silex, the editor reads the CMS schema and offers every field in menus, and values are composed with filters picked from lists (slugify, append, and so on). In Webstudio, you write the GraphQL query or the REST call yourself and compose values with a subset of JavaScript. A front end developer will feel at home in Webstudio. In Silex, an integrator with solid HTML and CSS can wire a page to the CMS alone.
That changes the shape of the team. With Silex, developers build components that designers reuse and configure, and designers assemble the sites. Profiles who know HTML and CSS well are easier to find than developers who know a given JavaScript framework. Silex does not remove the need for skills: it assumes the basics of integration. It moves the developer's time toward components rather than whole sites.
If you work alone as a freelance web designer, the same logic applies at your scale: you can take a project from the mockup to a site wired to the client's CMS on your own, and bring in a developer only for a specific component.
Both tools connect to modern headless CMSs. Webstudio accepts REST and GraphQL; Silex works with GraphQL and reads the schema on its own. Webstudio documents integrations with many CMSs, and Silex ships presets for WordPress, GitLab, Strapi and Supabase (in beta). Either way, the content model belongs to the client's CMS, not to the builder, which is what you want: the client keeps their back office, and the site is a front end you can redesign later without migrating content.
This is where Webstudio has something Silex does not. Its Content Mode, included in the Pro plan, lets a client edit content directly in the builder without touching the layout. Webstudio Cloud reads the data on each request, with an adjustable cache (Cache max age): no rebuild, but a delay that depends on that cache.
With Silex, the client edits in the CMS they know (the WordPress admin, Strapi, Directus) and never opens the builder, so they cannot break the layout. The site is rebuilt when content changes, usually through a webhook, so content is as fresh as the last publication. For most client sites, which change on a human schedule, that is fine. For a site that changes every few minutes, Webstudio's model fits better.
For an agency, the useful question is not what one site costs but what ten or twenty client sites cost. On Webstudio Cloud's free plan, sites stay on a wstd.io subdomain, and the CMS features (Resources, GraphQL, dynamic routes, CMS pages) only run in staging. As soon as a client's CMS site goes on the client's own domain, you need Pro: 15 USD a month on yearly billing, with unlimited sites on custom domains. What grows with your portfolio is the quota: 100,000 page views per month across all your sites, then 20 USD for each additional 100,000. Every client site you add draws on that same pool, so the bill follows the combined audience of your clients, and a portfolio of small brochure sites does not land in the same place as one that includes a busy media site. The Team plan, at 35 USD per month, adds workspaces, member roles and 5 seats. To step outside that model, Webstudio can export a static site or deploy through its CLI to Docker, Vercel or Netlify, and according to its FAQ, CMS integrations cost nothing when you self-host.
Silex has no paid plan, so the licence cost is the same for one client site or for twenty: zero, CMS features included. Each site is published to GitLab Pages, Framagit, FTP or a zip file, after an Eleventy build that queries the CMS and writes plain HTML. The published site makes no call to the API: the content is written into the HTML. You host it on your servers or the client's, and on a static host the bill does not follow the traffic: when one client's article takes off, the invoice does not change. To be fair, "no licence" does not mean "no cost": the agency runs the build, the hosting and the client's CMS itself, and that work grows with the number of sites.
An agency makes money when the tenth site costs less than the first. Every Silex site has the same architecture: a visual design, an Eleventy build, a CMS behind it. Instead of a stack that changes with each developer's favourite framework, you get sites that look alike under the hood, so any team member can pick up a site built by someone else. Silex publishes through git, which gives you a history of every change and lets you publish a test branch and a production branch. Webstudio's Pro plan also offers staging and production on its cloud, plus backups.
For a team that wants to build sites with AI assistance, the MCP server of Silex Desktop lets an AI assistant work through the editor's own tools, with the constraints that come with them, rather than editing raw files. It works with any AI provider. It is still in alpha: treat it as work in progress, not a delivered feature. Webstudio also lists an MCP in its Pro plan.
Clients ask this, and they are right to. With Silex, the delivered site is static HTML and CSS hosted where you chose. If Silex stopped tomorrow, the sites would stay online and keep being updated through the client's CMS. The editor itself can be self-hosted (CapRover makes installation and maintenance simpler), the code is entirely available, and it produces web standards that change slowly.
With Webstudio, sites exported as static files or deployed to your own infrastructure are just as independent. Sites running on Webstudio Cloud depend on that service. The builder is AGPL and can be self-hosted, but the team itself describes self-hosting the builder in production as "currently not the recommended path", and real time collaboration is reserved for the Cloud according to its FAQ.
Both projects are AGPL, and both are run by people who care about open source. Their economics differ. Webstudio is open core, as it openly states: the Pro limits are a configuration setting in the public code, which a self-hoster can legally switch on, while the optional animation module is proprietary under an EULA. According to Dealroom, Webstudio, Inc. raised a 1.2 million USD seed round in 2022, with Seedcamp among its investors. That funds a dedicated team, and it also means investors expect a return.
Silex is developed by Silex Labs, a non-profit association, since 2009. There is no paid tier and no proprietary module. For an agency, the question is not which model is morally better, but which one you want to build a decade of client work on.
| For an agency | Silex | Webstudio |
|---|---|---|
| Who wires the CMS | Integrator, from menus | Someone who writes the query and JS expressions |
| Client edits content | In their CMS, rebuild on change | In the builder (Content Mode, Pro), read on each request on the Cloud, with a cache |
| CMS site on client's domain | Free, hosted where you want | Pro plan on the Cloud, or self-hosted or exported |
| Cost and traffic | No licence, static hosting | 100,000 page views per month across all sites, then billed |
| Test and production | Git branches | Staging and production (Pro) |
| Model | Free software, non-profit | AGPL core, open core, venture-backed |
Choose Webstudio if your team is made of front end developers, if clients need to edit content inside the builder, if content must update without a rebuild, if you need mature dynamic routing out of the box, or if you are moving clients from Webflow, since it can paste elements copied from Webflow ("Paste from Webflow"). Its Cloud is convenient, and 15 USD a month for unlimited sites is reasonable for many agencies.
Choose Silex if you want designers and integrators to deliver CMS sites while developers focus on components, if you want every client site built the same way and published through git, if you or your clients want to host anywhere with costs that do not follow traffic, and if you want a tool with no paid tier whose price or limits can change.
To see the difference on a real build, read Silex vs Webstudio, side by side or watch the demo video. Then try the editor, follow the getting started with a CMS guide, read the CMS docs, and come talk about your agency's workflow in the community. Webstudio's documentation is worth a read too.