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Micropage vs Framer, a Framer alternative for sites you keep as text

Framer is a very good design tool that happens to publish websites. If you think in layouts, care about motion, and want the published page to look exactly like the canvas, it is hard to beat. If that is you, you can stop here.

This post is for the narrower case: you searched for a Framer alternative because the site is a landing page or a small product site, you write code, and you would rather edit a file than a canvas.

Where Framer wins

Design control. Framer gives you a freeform canvas, components, breakpoints and animation. Micropage gives you one look per site that you adjust with colors and a few section modifiers. If the brief says “pixel-perfect”, use Framer. Our own product facts page says so.

A bigger feature set. Framer has a CMS, localization, site search, password protection, staging and A/B testing as an add-on. Micropage has pages, forms, Markdown posts and a newsletter, and stops there on purpose.

Collaboration. Framer is built for teams: viewers are free, extra editors are $20/month, and content editors who only touch the CMS cost less. Micropage has no editor seats or roles. It is one account and a file.

A roomy free plan. Framer’s free plan allows a lot of pages and CMS collections, with a Framer domain and 1 GB of bandwidth, per its pricing page. Framer describes it as “ideal for non-commercial use”. Micropage’s free plan is one project on a micropage.sh subdomain.

Its own AI agents. Framer has built-in agents that run on monthly credits, and a preview feature for connecting external ones. AI help is not a reason to leave Framer.

The thing Framer cannot give you

Your site is not a file.

A Framer site lives in Framer’s project format and on Framer’s hosting. A Micropage site is a .page file that lives wherever you put it. Here is a complete one:

[site]
title: Harbor
description: Nightly backups for your Notion workspace

[nav]
Pricing -> /pricing
btn: Join -> /#waitlist

[Home -> /]

/// hero align:center
h1: Your Notion workspace, backed up nightly
p: Set it once. Restore any page, any day.
button: Join the waitlist -> /#waitlist

/// section
form: waitlist
input: Email*
submit: Get early access

[Pricing -> /pricing]

/// section
h2: One plan, $5 a month
p: Unlimited pages. Daily snapshots kept for 30 days.

Because that is text:

  • A copy change is a one-line diff in a pull request, reviewed like code.
  • git log is your version history. Revert a bad headline the way you revert a bad commit.
  • Any agent can edit it. The grammar is closed and line-oriented, so Claude, Cursor or Codex produce valid markup instead of inventing components. Every project ships a PROJECT_AGENT.md, and on Pro the MCP server lets an agent save and publish. You are not tied to one vendor’s agent or its credits.
  • It greps. Every page that still says “beta”, in one command.

Leaving

This is the sharpest difference, so it deserves its own heading.

Framer’s help center is direct about it: “Framer does not offer HTML export for self-hosting” (source). Published Framer sites depend on Framer’s infrastructure. There are third-party marketplace plugins that scrape a published site into files, but that is not the same as owning the source.

On Micropage, the .page source is plain text on every plan. On Pro, any build downloads as a static .zip of HTML, CSS and fonts that runs on Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, S3 or your own server. If you stop paying, you keep a working site.

Price

Framer’s paid plans are per site: Basic is $10/month billed yearly, with a custom domain, 30 pages and 50 GB of bandwidth; Pro is $30/month billed yearly (pricing). The free plan shows a “Made in Framer” badge until you upgrade or connect a domain (help).

Micropage Pro is $6/month or $49/year for 5 projects, each with your own domain, the CLI, the MCP server, zip export and no badge. Pro+ is $12/month for 20 projects, webhooks and CI deploy tokens.

Forms and email

Both have forms. On Micropage, a form is three lines of the file and submissions are stored per project: 100 a month on Free, 1,000 on Pro, CSV export and a daily digest on Pro, webhooks on Pro+. Turn on Newsletter for a form and it collects subscribers, and on Pro you can email them a post from the same place. How forms work has the details.

So which

Use Framer if design is the product: custom layouts, motion, a designer on the team, a CMS with many collections. It is the better tool for that job and I would not pretend otherwise.

Use Micropage if the site is a landing page or a small product site, you want the source in your repo, an agent of your choice does some of the editing, and you want a static build you can take with you.

Free publishes a real site on a micropage.sh subdomain, forms included, without a card. That is enough to see whether writing a site as a file suits you.

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