Framer: our review

Framer comes from design: the editor builds a site the way a layout tool would, layer by layer, with animated interactions and no code. Over the past two years, conversational agents have been grafted onto it: describing a page is enough to get an editable version, ready to adjust.

What the AI actually does here

Framer's agents don't just lay out a page from a prompt. They create CMS collections and fill them, build a code component on precise request, audit contrast, alt text and SEO before publishing, and read the site's traffic to suggest concrete fixes. The result stays a set of editable layers — text, image, component — not a frozen image you'd have to regenerate whole at the slightest change.

A Dutch company, US data

This is the point Framer's own product page doesn't state outright, one you have to dig for in its privacy statement. Framer B.V. is registered in Amsterdam, subject to Dutch law and to the GDPR as data controller. But the document is clear on another point: the servers used to host your data are located in the United States. The transfer outside the European Union relies on standard contractual clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework — real legal safeguards, but ones that organize a transfer, not a substitute for local hosting. For a client in the legal sector who asks that question by reflex the moment a vendor calls itself European, the answer deserves this nuance rather than a blanket yes.

Where portability falls short

Framer offers no HTML export of the site: its own documentation confirms it, published pages depend on internal functions — image resizing, server-side rendering — that only run on its infrastructure. Unlike Webflow, there's no degraded version to recover on a higher-tier plan. Only the domain name stays solidly yours, since the terms designate its holder as owner of the content published on it. The project's content itself is only deleted at your explicit written request after cancellation, never automatically.

Where it falls short on data

On every tier below Enterprise, the terms grant Framer a license to reuse your text and generations, once anonymized, to train its own AI models. A client who wants to avoid this must move to the Enterprise plan, quote-based — exactly the same mechanism as Bubble's for European hosting. It's one of the points we systematically check in an audit and advisory engagement before recommending a tool to a client, including for a simple showcase site listed among the free tools.

Our recommendation

Framer remains a good choice for designing a polished site fast, driven by agents that write and lay out. Reserve it for projects where the lack of an export will never matter: a showcase site you're willing to rebuild elsewhere rather than migrate. An organization that requires a portability guarantee, or verifiable European hosting, should look at Webflow instead.