Plans, Workspaces, Seats and Roles

This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official Webflow documentation before being relied on in production.

This sub-section’s Webflow bibliography lists the reference material consulted while preparing these pages.

This page was checked on 2026-10-28 against the Webflow Help Center, the Data API documentation and the public pricing page. Webflow has no version numbers, so everything below describes the product on that date. The plan names and limits changed in May 2026 and are still rolling out until 2026-11-16, and many Help Center articles still use the older names, so treat the date as part of every statement. Plans are named by tier only: prices change often and are not quoted here, so use the pricing page for amounts.

Who pays for what is the first thing to understand before building on Webflow, because it decides who can open the Designer, who can only edit content, whether a site can be served from a custom domain and whether custom code, code export or the CMS are available at all. Webflow splits the answer into three separate things: a Workspace plan (the people and the building tools), a Site plan (hosting one site) and seats (the people themselves, each with a role). This page explains each, the May 2026 change that merged and renamed tiers, the add-ons, the roles and their renamed vocabulary, the free Developer workspace that every code example in this sub-section uses, and a matrix that maps features to the lowest tier that unlocks them. It follows the introduction and architecture page and precedes product changes and deprecations, which gives the dated timeline.

The running example is Fernbrook Gardens, a fictitious botanical garden. A small team builds its site: a Site manager who owns the project, a Designer who builds pages, a Marketer who runs campaigns and publishes landing pages, a volunteer Content editor who updates the events calendar, and the board members who only leave comments. That mix of people is exactly what the seat model is designed for.

The three layers: Workspace, Site and seat

A Workspace is the container for people and sites. Every account has at least one. It holds the sites, the members with their seats and roles, shared libraries of components and variables, billing for the Workspace plan and the Workspace-level settings (integrations, apps, API tokens, security).

A Site is one website inside a Workspace. A site is created on the free Starter Site plan and can be upgraded to a paid Site plan to be served on a custom domain with higher CMS, bandwidth and form limits. The site plan belongs to the site, not to the Workspace, so one Workspace can hold sites on different plans.

A seat is the licence a person occupies in a Workspace. The seat type decides how much the person can do and whether the Workspace is charged for them. The role (Owner, Admin, Site manager, Designer, Marketer, Content editor, Reviewer) is what the person is allowed to do. Seats were introduced in December 2024 and replaced the old model in which each plan capped the number of collaborators.

flowchart TB W["Workspace
Workspace plan: Starter, Core, Growth, Freelancer, Agency, Enterprise"] W --> S1["Site A
Site plan: Starter, Basic, Premium, Team or Enterprise"] W --> S2["Site B
Ecommerce plan: Standard, Plus or Advanced"] W --> M["Members
seat + role"] M --> F["Full seat
Owner, Admin, Site manager, Designer"] M --> L["Limited seat
Marketer, Content editor"] M --> R["Free seat
Reviewer"] M --> C["Client seat
site-specific, Freelancer and Agency only"] A["Add-ons
Localize, Analyze, Optimize, AI credits"] -.-> S1 A -.-> W

The diagram is the whole model. When a question reads "can this person do X on this site?", answer it in three steps: which Workspace plan is the site’s Workspace on (tooling), which Site plan is the site on (hosting and limits), and which seat and role does the person hold (permission).

Workspace plans

A Workspace plan pays for the tools used to build and manage sites and for the people who do it. In October 2026 the Workspace tiers are:

  • Starter: free. One person can build and publish sites on webflow.io staging domains, learn the Designer and try the platform. Features that need collaboration or code reuse are absent.

  • Core: the entry paid tier for an individual who builds sites, with staging sites, custom code and code export.

  • Growth: adds more seats, shared libraries and the collaboration features a small team needs.

  • Freelancer: for people who build sites for clients. It adds client seats, so a client can edit content on the canvas without paying for a full seat, and guest access to client Workspaces.

  • Agency: the same client model at larger scale, with more seats and sites.

  • Enterprise: negotiated terms, custom roles, SSO and the security and scale features described later.

What a Workspace plan unlocks is mostly building features: staging sites, custom code, code export, shared libraries, the number of seats and the collaboration tools. Which of those each tier includes is listed on the pricing page and changes between revisions, so this page does not freeze a table for every tier. Where a limit is documented, it appears below.

Webflow also states that AI credits are included in every Workspace plan. They meter the AI features (the AI Assistant and the AI site builder, among others). The limits have been enforced since 2026-06-29, so a Workspace that exhausts its credits stops using those features until the allowance renews or more credits are bought.

Site plans

A Site plan pays for hosting one site on Webflow’s infrastructure. It sets the things a visitor and a content team feel: whether the site can use a custom domain, how many CMS items and Collections it can hold, how many static pages it can have, how much bandwidth is included, how many form submissions are kept and how many API requests per minute are allowed. In October 2026 the Site tiers are:

  • Starter: free hosting on a webflow.io domain. It is meant for building and testing, with small limits, for example 50 CMS items and 20 Collections, and 50 form submissions in total that are never reset.

  • Basic: a static site on a custom domain, with no CMS. It keeps a 300-page limit.

  • Premium: the tier that replaced the former CMS and Business plans. It has 300 static pages, 20,000 CMS items, 40 Collections and 50 GB of bandwidth with add-ons.

  • Team: a new annual all-in-one plan for one site. It includes 100 Collections, 10 seats, Localize with two locales, page branching, single-page publishing and the AEO agents (the answer-engine optimization tooling).

  • Enterprise: custom limits, an SLA, custom certificates, security headers and custom hosting, and the next-generation CMS with larger limits.

Hosting on every tier is delivered through Cloudflare’s network with free automatic TLS. Enterprise adds custom certificates, security headers, custom hosting and a 99.99% SLA, as described in the introduction and architecture page.

Ecommerce plans

Webflow Ecommerce is sold as Site plans of its own: Standard, Plus and Advanced. They include the CMS and add the store features (products, checkout, orders, inventory). The item limits are 500 products on Standard, 5,000 on Plus and 15,000 on Advanced, and Standard adds a 2% transaction fee that the higher tiers do not charge. The Ecommerce tiers were not changed by the May 2026 plans. The store itself is covered in the Ecommerce pages of this sub-section.

The May 2026 plan change

On 2026-05-13 Webflow launched simplified plans for new purchases, and the Help Center article "Updated pricing and simplified plans for May 2026" describes the change. The effects that matter when reading older material are these.

  • The former CMS and Business Site plans were merged into Premium. If a tutorial says "you need the CMS plan" or "you need the Business plan", read it as Premium on a new site. Basic stays static-only.

  • Team is new. It is annual, bundles Workspace and Site capabilities and is the first tier below Enterprise to include page branching, single-page publishing and the AEO agents.

  • The CMS item add-ons were removed, because Premium raised the included allowance.

  • AI credits are included in every Workspace plan, and their limits have applied since 2026-06-29.

Existing sites move on a schedule instead of all at once:

Date What happens

2026-05-13

New purchases use the May 2026 plans.

2026-06-29

Existing CMS and Business sites migrate to Premium at their next renewal or billable change after this date. AI credit limits are enforced from the same date.

2026-11-16

Sites in Freelancer and Agency Workspaces, and sites that still use pricing from 2022 or earlier, begin to migrate.

During the roll-out the same site can therefore be on the old names in one Workspace and the new names in another. The Help Center has not been rewritten everywhere, so many articles keep saying CMS or Business. The mapping to use is CMS and Business become Premium, and "one site that needs everything plus branching" becomes Team. Features that older articles describe as Enterprise-only, such as page branching, single-page publishing, the publishing workflow and the site activity log, are available on Team as well; the matrix later in this page lists them.

Add-ons

Add-ons extend a site or Workspace without changing its tier.

  • Localize adds secondary locales to a site. It comes as Localize Essential (3 locales and 10,000 words per locale per month for machine translation) and Localize Advanced (10 locales and 50,000 words). Publishing a secondary locale needs a paid Site plan and a Localize add-on, except that Team includes two locales. See the localization pages of this sub-section.

  • Analyze adds first-party analytics for traffic, conversions and, with Team or Enterprise, the AEO analytics that show how AI answer engines cite the site.

  • Optimize adds A/B/n testing, personalization and AI-optimized variations.

  • AI credits can be added when the included allowance runs out.

  • Bandwidth and, on some tiers, form-submission allowances can be raised with add-ons on the Site plan.

Analyze and Optimize are add-ons, not part of any standard tier, so a feature that "needs Analyze" needs the paid add-on on top of the site’s plan.

Seats

Seats were announced in December 2024. A seat is a person in a Workspace, and the seat type decides whether the Workspace pays for that person and how deeply they can use the Designer.

Seat Roles it can hold Notes

Full seat

Owner, Admin, Site manager, Designer

Paid. Full Designer access and, depending on the role, billing, members and site settings.

Limited seat

Marketer, Content editor

Paid at a lower level. Work on the canvas with a restricted toolbox: edit text, images, CMS items and, for the Marketer, SEO and some page settings, but not the structure or styles.

Free seat

Reviewer

Free, up to 100 per Workspace. Can view the site and leave comments but not edit.

Client seat

Content editor (client)

Specific to one site. Exists only in Freelancer and Agency Workspaces so that a client can edit content on the canvas.

Guest

Any role granted inside someone else’s Workspace

Lets a Freelancer or Agency Workspace work inside a client’s Workspace without moving the site.

Three practical consequences follow. Reviewers cost nothing, so the garden’s board members can comment on every draft without increasing the bill. A client’s content editor does not need a full seat if the agency is on Freelancer or Agency. And a Workspace’s headcount is a function of seat types, not of a per-plan cap, so the cheapest way to grow a team is to put people on the least powerful seat that still lets them do their job.

The legacy Editor is gone

Before seats, content editing for people without Designer access happened in the Editor, reached by adding /?edit to a published page’s URL, with a bottom toolbar. It was retired in stages: client seats arrived on 2026-02-02, automatic migration of Editor users began on 2026-05-04, the Editor became unavailable on 2026-08-04, and it was fully deprecated on 2026-10-05, when the ?edit URL stopped working. Content is now edited directly on the canvas by users who hold a seat, usually a Limited seat or a Client seat. Guides that explain the Editor, including the whole Editor-centred chapter of the reference book Webflow by Example (Packt, 2021), are obsolete on this point; the concepts of editing text, images and CMS items are the same, but the entry point and the licensing are different.

Roles

A role is a named set of permissions on the Workspace and on its sites. Webflow renamed three roles, which matters when reading older articles and API documentation.

Role (2026 name) Older name What it can do

Owner

Owner

The single account owner of the Workspace. Everything an Admin can do, plus billing ownership, transferring the Workspace and deleting it.

Admin

Admin

Manages members, seats, billing and Workspace settings, and has Site manager rights on every site.

Site manager

Site admin

Manages one or more sites: publishing, site settings, domains, backups and restores, and the people assigned to the site. Only Site managers can restore a backup.

Designer

Designer

Builds in the Designer: structure, styles, components, variables, interactions and the CMS schema.

Marketer

(new)

Limited seat. Edits content and the marketing-relevant settings of a page, such as SEO fields and open graph data, without touching structure or styles.

Content editor

Can edit

Limited seat. Edits text, images and CMS item content on the canvas, and publishes content within the limits set for the site.

Reviewer

Commenter

Free seat. Views and comments only.

Each role’s exact permission list is long and changes as features ship, so the authoritative reference is the Help Center article "Seats, roles, and permissions overview" and the per-role articles linked from it. Two patterns are stable. First, structural power rises with the seat type: only full seats can change the design system. Second, role assignment is per site as well as per Workspace: a Site manager of one site can be a Reviewer on another.

Custom roles

Enterprise Workspaces can define up to 20 custom roles. A custom role starts from the permissions of a built-in role and adds or removes specific capabilities, for example "can publish but cannot change domains" for a release coordinator. Custom roles are the way to apply least privilege when the built-in roles are too coarse, and they are recorded in the Workspace audit log. They are an Enterprise feature; on every other tier the seven built-in roles are the whole vocabulary.

Roles in the Fernbrook Gardens team

Person Seat Role Why

Garden director

Full

Owner

Holds billing and the Workspace.

Web lead

Full

Site manager

Publishes, manages the domain, restores backups.

Freelance designer

Full or Guest

Designer

Builds the templates and the design system.

Communications officer

Limited

Marketer

Writes landing pages and SEO fields.

Events volunteer

Limited

Content editor

Updates the events calendar CMS items.

Board members

Free

Reviewer

Comment on drafts, free of charge.

The Developer workspace

The Developer workspace is a free Workspace designed for people who build apps, integrations and code on top of Webflow. Every developer example in this sub-section runs on a Developer workspace site, so a reader does not need a paid plan to follow along. Its documented characteristics are these.

  • Free of charge, with up to 3 users.

  • Unlimited unhosted sites, with custom code, page branching and the site activity log available for testing.

  • An API limit of 120 requests per minute, the same as paid Site plans.

  • It cannot publish to production domains, export code or transfer sites, and it is limited to 1,000 visitors per month, so it is a sandbox rather than a place to host a real site.

When a page in this sub-section needs a paid or Enterprise plan, it says so. The Developer workspace is also the right place to experiment with webhooks and OAuth apps against sites whose content can be deleted safely.

# List the Developer workspace sites visible to a site or workspace token.
# WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN is a placeholder: never commit a real token.
curl --request GET \
  --url https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  --header "accept: application/json"

Source: Data API: List Sites

The Data API applies a per-minute rate limit that depends on the plan: 60 requests per minute on Starter and Basic sites, 120 on paid plans and on Developer workspaces, and custom limits on Enterprise. Team receives five times the CMS API limits. Site publishing is limited to one per minute everywhere. When a request exceeds the limit the API returns 429 with a Retry-After header, and the official SDKs retry with backoff automatically.

// Minimal manual back-off for a raw HTTP call; the SDKs already do this.
async function listSites(token: string): Promise<unknown> {
  for (let attempt = 0; attempt < 3; attempt++) {
    const response = await fetch("https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites", {
      headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${token}` },
    });
    if (response.status !== 429) {
      return response.json();
    }
    const waitSeconds = Number(response.headers.get("Retry-After") ?? "60");
    await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, waitSeconds * 1000));
  }
  throw new Error("Rate limited three times in a row");
}

Source: Data API: Rate limits

Feature to minimum plan

The matrix gives the lowest tier at which a feature becomes available, with tier names only. Official pages are not always consistent about whether a Workspace plan or a Site plan unlocks a feature, so the column says which kind of plan is the gate according to the most recent Help Center wording, and the entries marked "re-check" are the ones where sources disagree.

Feature Minimum tier Notes

Build and publish on webflow.io

Starter (Workspace and Site)

Free.

Custom domain with TLS

Basic (Site)

Automatic TLS on every tier.

CMS Collections and items

Premium (Site)

Starter has a small CMS allowance for building; Basic has no CMS.

20,000 CMS items and 40 Collections

Premium (Site)

Replaces the former CMS and Business limits.

100 Collections

Team (Site)

Enterprise next-generation CMS goes further.

Custom code (head, footer and Code Embed)

Paid plan (re-check)

Sources disagree on Workspace plan or Site plan. 50,000 characters per box.

Code export

Core (Workspace)

Disabled on Developer workspaces. Drops the CMS, ecommerce, forms and search.

Staging sites

Core (Workspace)

Developer workspaces have unhosted sites.

Shared libraries

Paid Workspace plan (re-check)

Availability is stated inconsistently.

Client seats and guest access

Freelancer (Workspace)

Also Agency.

Page branching

Team (Site)

Also Enterprise. Older articles say Enterprise only.

Single-page publishing

Team (Site)

Also Enterprise.

Publishing workflow and site activity log

Team (Site)

Also Enterprise. The activity log is also in Developer workspaces.

Scheduled CMS publishing

Premium (Site)

Not available on Starter or Basic.

Localization with secondary locales

Paid Site plan plus Localize

Team includes two locales.

Analyze and Optimize

Paid Site plan plus the add-on

AEO analytics needs Team or Enterprise plus Analyze.

Ecommerce

Standard (Site)

Plus and Advanced raise the item limits.

Custom roles (up to 20)

Enterprise (Workspace)

No other tier.

Custom certificates, security headers, custom hosting, 99.99% SLA

Enterprise (Site)

See the introduction.

Workspace API tokens

Enterprise (Workspace)

Documentation disagrees; re-check.

Correcting older advice

The reference book Webflow by Example describes Webflow as it was in 2021, and its plan chapter is out of date in several ways that this page corrects.

  • It names Workspace-style account plans Lite, Pro and Team, and Site plans Basic, CMS and Business with 2,000 and 10,000 CMS items and 100-page caps. None of those names or limits is current. The 2026 Site tiers are Starter, Basic, Premium, Team and Enterprise with the limits above.

  • It uses the words "project" and "Project Settings"; the current vocabulary is site and Site settings.

  • It ties the Editor and its collaborators to the CMS plan and the /?edit URL; the Editor is gone and editing needs a seat.

  • It ties code export to one plan in one place and to another in a different place, and the two statements contradict each other. Code export today needs a paid Workspace plan and is disabled on Developer workspaces.

  • It states 30 fields per Collection; the limit is 60 (100 on Enterprise next-generation CMS).

Pitfalls and good practice

  • Do not confuse the two plan layers. Upgrading a Workspace plan does not host a site on a custom domain; the Site plan does. Conversely a Site plan does not give a person more seats.

  • Check the date of any plan article. The Help Center still contains many pages that say CMS or Business plan. Before acting on one, map it to Premium and check the limits.

  • Put people on the smallest seat that works. Reviewers are free, Marketers and Content editors are cheaper than Designers, and a client on a Freelancer or Agency Workspace can have a Client seat.

  • Restrict who can restore backups. Only Site managers can restore, and restoring a backup made before 2024-03-25 resets Collection and item IDs, which breaks API integrations that stored those IDs.

  • Use Developer workspaces for experiments. They cannot publish to production, so a mistake cannot reach visitors.

  • Plan the migration window. Sites that fall under the 2026-11-16 migration group should review their Premium or Team mapping before the renewal date.

  • Keep tokens least-privileged. API tokens inherit the permissions of the person or Workspace that created them. Use a site token with only the scopes an integration needs, and rotate it when a person leaves the team.

References