Contentive vs Framer for client sites
Framer is the fastest way to design a beautiful site. As a Framer alternative for agencies, we trade canvas freedom for a client editor that can't break it.
Framer is the fastest way we know to get from an idea in a designer's head to a beautiful, live website. If you're reading a comparison with Framer in it, you've probably already shipped something in it and enjoyed the process. That matters, and this post starts there.
What Framer is genuinely better at
Design speed, first. A good designer in Framer can go from a blank page to a polished, responsive site in a day, without a developer in the loop. Animation and interaction are where it really pulls ahead: scroll effects, hover states, page transitions and small moments of motion are built visually, tuned by eye and shipped without anyone writing code. The templates are beautiful, the community is lively and the published sites are fast.
If the job is a design-led launch, where the site is the brand statement and the motion is part of the point, Framer is very hard to beat. We'd use it ourselves for that job.
The handover question
The trouble starts with a different job: the site the client will edit every week for three years.
Framer's content editing, whether that's its CMS collections or editing text on the page, is a layer on top of a design canvas. The client is working inside the thing the designer built, and the boundary between "change the words" and "change the design" is drawn by what the tool lets them touch. That boundary has improved over time, and for a client who edits twice a year it's often fine.
Contentive starts from the other end. The site is built from a content model: the types of thing it contains, the fields each one has and the sections a page can be composed from. The client's editor is generated from that model, so it contains no layout at all. There's no padding to nudge, no breakpoint to break and no fourth card to squeeze into a three-card row, because none of those exist in what the client sees. We wrote the long version of that argument in content control, not design control.
Animations and interaction, honestly
This is where we cost you something real. Our sites render through Liquid themes, and a theme can carry its own JavaScript files and per-template CSS, so a Contentive site can have exactly the motion a Framer site has. But there's no visual motion tool. Someone writes the transitions, the scroll effects and the hover states, in code, and tests them in a browser.
For a team with a front-end developer, that's a normal afternoon and the result is reusable on the next site. For a design-led studio with no one who writes code, it's a wall, and Framer is the easier road. We'd rather say that here than have you find out in week two. There's more on why we chose this in why we don't have a drag-and-drop editor.
Content beyond the site
Framer's content lives in Framer and is rendered by Framer. That's simple and it works. Contentive's content sits behind a GraphQL API with a typed SDK, generated from the model, so the same events, locations or case studies can feed a second site, an app or a screen in reception later without being maintained twice. When the redesign comes, you swap the theme and the content doesn't move.
If the client will only ever have one website, this won't matter. If you've ever been asked for "the same content, but also over there", it will.
Agency economics
Our pricing is built around how agencies run: £39 a month covers three live sites, then £10.99 a month for each further live site. Workspaces that aren't live yet, whether they're staging-only, empty or archived, cost nothing, and seats are unlimited. Inviting the client, their marketing manager and the intern never changes the bill. Billing is monthly. Framer's plans change from time to time, so check their current pricing page rather than trusting any comparison, including this one.
Migrating a Framer site
There's no Framer importer. The honest route is to clone the site, which captures the public pages into a starting theme and pages in staging with images, fonts and stylesheets re-hosted, or to run our scraper, which pulls the content and suggests a content model. Either way you then rebuild the theme properly. In this version a cloned site has its words inside the copied sections rather than as separate editable fields, and nested URLs are flattened with redirects added. Treat it as a head start on a rebuild, not a finished migration, and price it as a rebuild. The animations don't come across at all.
Who edits, and how often
The useful question before choosing isn't "which tool is better". It's "who opens this site after launch, and what do they want to do there". A founder who updates the hero once a quarter is a different user from an office manager adding three events a week and a new team member every month.
For the first, Framer's editing is a pleasure, and the occasional slip is easy to fix. For the second, every edit is another chance to drift from the design, and you're the one who gets the message when it does. Contentive was built for the second user. They get a form for each kind of thing the site contains, and they can add as many entries as they like without the site ever looking different from how you designed it.
Reuse across client sites
A Framer site is usually its own thing: designed for one brand, built on one canvas. That's part of why it looks so good. A Contentive theme is a set of files in your own git, and a content model can be saved and applied to the next project. By the fifth client site in the same sector, you're starting from a working theme and model rather than a blank page, and the differences are brand, content and the odd new section.
That doesn't suit every agency. If each project is a bespoke piece of design, there's little to reuse. If you sell a repeatable kind of site, it's where most of the margin comes from.
Agents
Contentive exposes the whole platform to AI agents over MCP, so you can point Claude or Cursor at a workspace and have it build the content model, the pages, the contact form and a first Liquid theme. Everything it makes is an ordinary object in the Studio afterwards, editable by hand, and its work lands in staging for a person to review before anything goes live. You bring your own agent, so there's no markup on tokens. Framer has its own AI features, such as generating a page layout from a prompt and building components without code, and they're good at what they do. The difference is that ours is aimed at building and running the whole site, not the design alone.
The trade, stated plainly
Framer gives the designer more and the client more to get wrong. Contentive gives the client less and the agency more control over what stays fixed. Neither is better in the abstract. It depends on who's holding the tool after launch, and how often.
When to pick which
Pick Framer for a design-led launch the client won't edit much: a campaign site, a portfolio, a product launch where the motion is the message. Pick Contentive when the client edits weekly, when there are many entries of the same kind of thing, or when you want the next twenty sites to start from the same theme and model.
Plenty of agencies will run both, on different projects. That's the right instinct, and it's how we'd do it.