The short answer
Over three years, a typical small business site commonly costs $1,500 to $6,000 on self-hosted WordPress and $1,500 to $5,000 on Webflow, before paid design help. The totals overlap heavily; what differs is the shape of the spending. WordPress is cheap to run and expensive to neglect. Webflow costs more per month and quietly does the maintenance for you.
The platforms also buy different kinds of labor. WordPress money goes to plugins and upkeep. Webflow money goes to the subscription and, usually, to a designer at build time, because Webflow's editor rewards design skill more than it rewards beginners.
Build costs
WordPress: the software is free. A realistic DIY build costs a theme (free to around $100), a page builder or block library (free to $100 per year), and your time, commonly a week or more of evenings for a first site. Hiring out, freelancers commonly charge $2,000 to $8,000 for a small business WordPress site, with the huge ecosystem keeping rates competitive.
Webflow: the platform is the builder. DIY is possible but has a steeper learning curve than mainstream site builders; it is closer to a design tool than a template-filler. Templates commonly run free to around $130. Freelancer builds commonly land in the same $2,000 to $8,000 band as WordPress, sometimes higher because the Webflow talent pool is smaller. The tradeoff between starting from a template versus paying for fully custom design is its own decision, which we compare in custom website vs template cost.
Verdict on build cost: roughly a tie for hired work; WordPress is friendlier for determined DIYers, Webflow rewards those with design comfort.
Hosting and subscriptions
WordPress: you bring your own hosting, commonly $5 to $30 per month for shared or budget cloud hosting and $25 to $60 per month for managed WordPress hosting with backups and staging. Domain extra. The full range of hosting tiers is covered in our website hosting cost guide.
Webflow: hosting is the product. Site plans commonly run in the neighborhood of $15 to $40 per month for typical business sites, more with CMS scale or ecommerce, and there is no cheaper third-party hosting option; the subscription is non-negotiable as long as the site is live. Check Webflow's current pricing page for exact tiers, since they change.
Verdict: WordPress can be meaningfully cheaper here, especially on budget hosting. Webflow's fee is higher but includes things WordPress hosts charge extra for: fast CDN delivery, SSL, backups, and zero server management.
Maintenance: where the totals diverge
WordPress requires ongoing updates to core, theme, and plugins. Handled yourself, that is an hour or so a month plus occasional breakage. Handled by a maintenance plan, commonly $30 to $150 per month. Skipped entirely, it becomes a security risk with real cleanup costs. This is the hidden tax on WordPress's cheap sticker price, and over three years it often erases the hosting savings.
Webflow has effectively no software maintenance. No plugins to update, no compatibility matrix, no hack cleanup industry. Content edits happen in a visual editor that is safe to hand to non-technical staff. The maintenance line on a Webflow budget is close to zero.
Verdict: Webflow wins clearly. If you have no one who will reliably do WordPress upkeep, this single row should probably decide the comparison.
Hidden costs on each side
WordPress: premium plugin subscriptions accumulate (forms, SEO, backups, sliders, commonly $100 to $400 per year combined); cheap hosting gets slow as traffic grows; a neglected site eventually needs a paid rescue. Freedom is real but has a stewardship cost.
Webflow: per-site pricing punishes people running several sites; CMS item limits and plan tiers can force upgrades as content grows; the ecosystem of ready-made functionality is far smaller, so features WordPress solves with a $50 plugin may need custom work or third-party tools. And leaving Webflow means rebuilding, since exports do not carry the CMS with them in a usable way.
Who each platform fits
Choose WordPress if you need heavy content publishing, niche functionality (memberships, directories, events, LMS), multilingual complexity, or the freedom to move hosts and vendors freely. It fits businesses with someone technical in reach, or a maintenance plan budgeted honestly from day one.
Choose Webflow if the site is a marketing site first, design quality is a priority, publishing volume is moderate, and nobody wants to think about updates ever. It fits design-conscious businesses that would rather pay $30 a month than manage anything.
Either can be wrong at the extremes: a five-page brochure site might be cheapest on a mainstream builder instead, and a complex web application belongs on neither.
Run the three-year total
- Price the build the same way on both (same scope, same designer tier).
- Add 36 months of hosting or subscription at realistic tiers.
- Add maintenance honestly: your time or a plan for WordPress, roughly zero for Webflow.
- Add plugin or tool subscriptions you know you will need.
- Compare totals and, more importantly, compare who does the ongoing work in each column.
Most people who run this exercise find the totals within a couple of thousand dollars of each other, at which point the deciding question is not money but stewardship: pick WordPress if you will genuinely maintain it, and Webflow if you want that obligation priced into the subscription. Do the arithmetic for your own scope before any vendor does it for you.