Framer Sites is the current product. The Framer App is a deprecated mobile prototyping tool that was sunset years ago. If you are evaluating Framer in 2026, you are choosing between Framer Sites, the production website builder, and historical references to the legacy Framer App that once focused on mobile interaction prototypes. This guide explains the difference, why the confusion persists, and what to actually use today.
The Short Answer: Framer Sites Is What Exists Today
Framer the company pivoted hard around 2021 to 2022. The original product, often called the Framer App or Framer Classic, was a desktop application focused on advanced interaction prototypes for product teams. Designers used it to mock up app screens with code-driven animation, before Figma had any meaningful prototyping features.
That product was discontinued. The team rebuilt the platform as Framer Sites, a web-based design and publishing tool that competes with Webflow and Squarespace. The new product handles full website production: visual canvas, CMS, components, custom code, hosting, and SEO. The legacy desktop app no longer receives updates, and the documentation has been archived.
If a search result, tutorial, or course mentions the Framer App, check the date. Anything written before 2022 is referring to the legacy product. Tutorials from 2023 onward describe Framer Sites, even when they use the older name colloquially.
What the Legacy Framer App Did
The legacy Framer App ran as a Mac desktop application. It used CoffeeScript and later JavaScript to drive interactions, layers, and animations. Designers wrote real code to specify how a tap on one element would trigger a transition on another. It was powerful and steep, more like a creative coding environment than a typical design tool.
The use case was high-fidelity mobile interaction prototyping. Product teams at companies like Google, Coinbase, and Meta used it to spec micro-interactions before development. The output was an interactive prototype, not a shippable website.
Framer Classic, as it became known, was excellent for that narrow job and difficult to use outside it. As Figma matured and added prototyping, the market for a code-first prototyping tool shrank. The team made the call to repurpose the brand and engineering effort for a broader audience: marketing teams shipping websites.
What Framer Sites Does Now
Framer Sites is a full website builder. The canvas is web-based, no installation needed beyond a browser. The unit of work is a published website with pages, components, a CMS, custom domains, and hosting. The visual model uses auto-layout, similar to Figma, with web-aware constraints like flex direction, padding, and breakpoints.
The feature set covers everything modern marketing teams need. CMS for blog and changelog content. Components with variants and properties for design system reuse. Custom code blocks for embeds and overrides. Code components in TypeScript for fully custom interactive elements. SEO controls including meta titles, descriptions, sitemap generation, and structured data. Built-in performance optimization with image compression, lazy loading, and global CDN.
The output is production HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sites publish to Framer’s hosting infrastructure with custom domain support. We covered the platform fundamentals in our Framer beginner tutorial.
Pricing Differences
The legacy Framer App used a one-time license model in its later years before transitioning to subscription. Pricing is irrelevant now since the product is no longer sold. Existing users were given migration paths and discounts on the new product.
Framer Sites uses per-site subscription pricing. The free plan publishes to a framer.website subdomain with bandwidth and CMS limits. Paid plans run from 5 dollars per month per site for the Mini tier, 15 dollars per month for Basic, 30 dollars per month for Pro, and custom pricing for Business and Enterprise. Annual billing reduces costs by roughly 20 percent.
Pricing is per-site, not per-seat for the standard plans, which is unusual in the SaaS market. A workspace with five published sites on Basic costs 75 dollars per month total. Workspace plans with seat-based billing are available for agencies and teams managing many sites. We laid out the full math in our Framer pricing guide.
Why People Still Search for Framer App
The naming overlap creates confusion in three ways. First, older tutorials, courses, and Stack Overflow threads still rank for prototyping queries. Search results for advanced animation tutorials still surface 2018 to 2020 content describing the legacy desktop app. Designers new to Framer find these and assume the current product works the same way.
Second, Framer’s marketing occasionally uses app-like language to describe Sites’ capabilities. The Framer team built native iOS and Android apps for content editing, which adds another layer of confusion. The mobile editing apps work alongside Framer Sites, but they are companion tools, not the product itself.
Third, the term Framer App appears in casual usage in design communities to mean the Framer canvas, which lives in a browser tab. Designers say I am opening the Framer App when they mean I am opening framer.com. This habit predates the rebrand and persists.
Should You Use Framer for Mobile Prototyping in 2026?
Framer Sites is not built for mobile interaction prototyping. The canvas is web-first, the export model is HTML, and the interaction primitives target web pages, not native apps. If you need to prototype iOS or Android micro-interactions for a product team, use Figma, ProtoPie, or Origami Studio. Framer is the wrong tool for that job.
If you need a marketing website for your mobile app, Framer Sites is excellent. App download pages, feature walkthroughs, pricing, blog, and support documentation all live in Framer’s wheelhouse. The shipped sites convert well and look modern, which matters for app marketing. We covered the broader approach in our Framer landing page guide.
Migrating from Legacy Framer to Framer Sites
If you have a legacy Framer Classic file and want to rebuild it as a Framer site, expect a full rewrite, not a migration. The data models and interaction primitives are different enough that no clean import path exists. The original code-driven interactions translate poorly to Framer Sites’ visual model.
The practical approach is to use the legacy file as a reference and rebuild the relevant pieces in Framer Sites’ component model. For most teams, the legacy prototype was a research artifact, not a production deliverable, so the rewrite is small. Marketing pages, app store landing pages, and product showcase sites are common rebuild targets, and Framer Sites handles all three well.
The Verdict
If you are deciding between Framer Sites and Framer App in 2026, the choice is already made. Framer Sites is the product. The Framer App was a different product for a different job, and that job is now better served by Figma and ProtoPie.
For website production, Framer Sites is one of the strongest tools on the market. The visual model is fast, the output is fast, and the team ships features regularly. For app interaction prototyping, look elsewhere. The naming overlap is a quirk of the rebrand, not a meaningful product choice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to the Framer App?
The legacy Framer App, also called Framer Classic, was a desktop tool for advanced interaction prototyping. The team discontinued it around 2021 to 2022 and rebuilt the platform as Framer Sites, a web-based website builder for production marketing sites.
Can I still download the old Framer App?
Framer no longer offers the legacy desktop app for download or purchase. Existing licenses still run on supported macOS versions, but the application receives no updates and has no official support channel.
Is Framer Sites the same as Framer the website builder?
Yes. Framer Sites is the official current product, often referred to simply as Framer. It is a web-based design and publishing tool for marketing websites, blogs, and landing pages, with a CMS, components, and built-in hosting.
Should I use Framer for mobile app prototyping?
No. Framer Sites is built for web pages, not native app interactions. Use Figma, ProtoPie, or Origami Studio for mobile prototyping. Framer Sites is excellent for the marketing website that promotes your mobile app.
Does Framer have native mobile apps?
Framer offers companion iOS and Android apps for editing content and previewing sites on mobile. These are not the product itself, just supporting tools that work alongside the main browser-based editor.
Ready to build a production Framer site that ships fast and converts? Explore Framer Websites pricing for fixed-cost engagements with senior design and development on every project.