Ep.53 - Webstudio Open Source Web Builder

So, you want to quickly build a web page or web pages?

You might be familiar with Squarespace, Wix, Webflow etc. all of which use these visual designers to help you quickly build the webpages you desire.

The only issue is you are locked in to their platform hosting and of course monthly/yearly subscription costs.

Webstudio is a really neat open source version - very much like Webflow and currently in beta (although very feature rich already!).

The visual editor is available as an online app or you can download the app for Windows, Mac, Linux.  I have a feeling (sorry! not investigated enough here!) it is based on or around something like Electron (I did a podcast a while ago about this).

But the other good news is you can take the hosting part of this open source project and host the web apps you build anywhere you like... locally, docker or your hosting platform of choice.

Webstudio do offer hosting themselves - actually they use CloudFlare workers which provide a serverless hosting model sort of like AWS Lambda/Azure Serverless etc.  They have a free tier too if you want to use their hosting to try things out.

As you can tweak/embed Webstudio in your own apps too, this really does make for an interesting option to not be locked into one platform and endless costs - obviously always check the licensing!

Open source = Awesame Sauce perhaps :)

[bctt tweet="Take #justfivemins to learn something new!"]