If you are an agency or studio building websites for clients, the Framer versus Showit conversation looks completely different than it does for someone building their own site.

Most comparisons miss this. They cover ease of use, pricing plans, and animation features — useful things, but not the things that matter when you are delivering work to clients on a deadline, handing off a CMS to someone who has never touched a website builder, or managing multiple projects at once.

This article is specifically for studios, freelancers, and operators who build for clients. Here is what actually matters.

The real question for agencies

When you are building your own site, you are the one who customizes it, updates it, and lives with the decisions. When you are building for a client, three things matter above everything else:

How fast can you go from brief to live site? How easily can the client update their own content after handoff? And how much does it cost to run multiple client projects at once?

Everything else — animations, template libraries, mobile responsiveness — is secondary to those three questions.

Speed of delivery: Framer wins clearly

Framer's template ecosystem is genuinely useful for agency delivery. When you have a client who needs a professional site in a week, starting from a well-built template cuts your build time significantly.

The Framer Marketplace has templates built for specific industries and use cases — finance firms, AI startups, design studios, SaaS products — which means you are not adapting a generic starting point for every project. You are starting closer to done.

Showit has templates too, but the selection is narrower and the templates tend toward a similar aesthetic. If your client is outside the creative and lifestyle space where Showit traditionally works best, you will spend more time customizing and less time building.

For agencies who need to move fast on diverse projects, Framer is the clearer choice.

Client CMS handoff: Framer is better for most use cases

After you deliver the site, your client needs to update it themselves. This is where the builder choice makes or breaks the relationship.

Framer's CMS is clean, visual, and fast to learn. Clients update content through a simple collections interface — no separate dashboard, no switching between tools. For a studio that delivers a site with a portfolio section, a team page, and a blog, Framer's CMS handles all of that natively and intuitively.

Showit's content management runs through WordPress, which is powerful but adds complexity. Your client now has two interfaces to navigate — the Showit design app and the WordPress dashboard. For clients who are not technical, this creates confusion and support requests. For you, it creates ongoing maintenance.

The exception: if your client specifically needs advanced blogging capabilities, WordPress integration gives them more control than Framer's native CMS. For content-heavy sites with high publishing frequency, that matters.

For most agency use cases — portfolio updates, team changes, adding case studies, publishing occasional articles — Framer's CMS is cleaner and easier to hand off.

Pricing for multi-client agencies

This is the part most comparisons skip entirely.

Framer charges per site. Each client site you publish needs its own plan. At $15 to $25 per month per site on a Basic or Pro plan, that adds up quickly if you are managing ten or twenty client sites.

However, there is a practical workaround: most agencies charge clients for hosting as part of a retainer or monthly fee. If you are billing $50 to $100 per month for hosting and maintenance, Framer's $25 Pro plan fits inside that cleanly.

Showit also charges per site, starting at $19 per month. The difference is less significant than it looks, and for agencies that include hosting in their client packages, both platforms work on similar economics.

The bigger consideration is the template licensing model. If you purchase a Framer template with an unlimited sites license, you can use it across multiple client projects. At $79 for a single license and $129 for unlimited, a well-built Framer template pays for itself on the second client project.

White-labeling and branding removal

Agencies generally do not want their clients to see a "Made in Framer" or "Made in Showit" badge on the delivered site.

Framer's badge appears on free and Mini plan sites and disappears on Basic and above. On a paid plan, the site is fully white-labeled with no platform attribution.

Showit operates similarly — paid plans remove platform branding.

Both work for professional agency delivery on paid plans. Not a differentiator.

Responsive design and quality control

This matters more for agencies than for individual builders because your name is attached to every site you deliver.

Framer's breakpoint system gives you precise control over how a site behaves at different screen sizes. You decide exactly how the layout responds — you are not relying on automatic adjustments. This is more work upfront but produces better results, especially for complex layouts.

Showit handles mobile responsiveness more automatically, which is faster to set up but less controllable. For straightforward layouts, this is fine. For complex or unconventional designs, you may find yourself fighting the automatic behavior.

If your agency does high-design work where every detail matters, Framer's manual breakpoint control is worth the extra setup time.

The verdict for agencies

Choose Framer if you deliver diverse projects across different industries, need to move fast from brief to live site, want clean CMS handoffs your clients can actually use, and do high-design work where visual control matters.

Choose Showit if your clients are primarily in photography, blogging, coaching, or lifestyle — and they need serious WordPress blogging capabilities after handoff.

For most modern agencies and studios — especially those working with SaaS products, finance firms, tech companies, and design-forward brands — Framer is the right foundation.

Starting from the right template

The fastest way to deliver high-quality Framer sites for clients is to start with a template built for their specific context — not a general-purpose layout you adapt every time.

For design studios and agencies presenting their own services, Zevia is built around a sprint-based agency model with CMS case studies, a booking integration, and a complete set of legal and utility pages. It hands off to clients cleanly and looks credible from the first scroll.

For finance firms, investment funds, and professional services clients, Northbrook was built for institutional credibility — dark editorial aesthetic, CMS-powered portfolio, and a structure that communicates authority before a word is read.

Both are available at jalaleddine.me.

Jalal Eddine builds premium Framer templates for agencies, founders, and operators.

Browse templates