Framer is a professional design and publishing platform built for marketing sites, landing pages, and portfolios that need polish, animations, SEO, and a real CMS. Notion Sites is a way to publish Notion pages as basic websites with minimal styling. Choose Framer for client work, marketing sites, and serious launches. Choose Notion Sites only for internal docs, small wikis, or fast-and-rough public pages.
What Each Platform Actually Is
Framer is a full website builder. You design in a canvas, use components and CMS collections, animate elements, and publish to a global CDN. The output is production-grade, indexable by search engines, and competitive with hand-coded sites on Core Web Vitals.
Notion Sites is a thin publishing layer on top of Notion pages. You take a Notion page or workspace and flip it to public with a custom domain. The styling options are limited. There are no design controls in the way that designers think about them — no breakpoints, no hover states, no animation timeline.
The two products solve fundamentally different problems. Framer is for sites where design is part of the product. Notion Sites is for sites where the goal is publishing content quickly without leaving Notion.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | Framer | Notion Sites |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing (basic site) | Free, $5–$40/mo paid | Free with Notion, $8/mo for Sites Plus |
| Custom domain | Yes (all paid plans) | Yes (Sites Plus) |
| Design flexibility | Full pixel control, layouts, breakpoints | Minimal — Notion’s block styling only |
| Animations | Native scroll, hover, gesture animations | None |
| Components | Yes — variants, instances, overrides | No |
| CMS | Yes — collections, dynamic pages, references | Notion databases (limited) |
| SEO controls | Full — meta, OG, schema, sitemap, redirects | Basic — title, description, OG image |
| E-commerce | Native commerce + Shopify integration | None |
| Forms | Native + integrations | No native forms |
| Performance | Excellent — global CDN, image optimization | Acceptable — Notion’s infrastructure |
| Mobile responsive | Designer-controlled breakpoints | Auto only — no overrides |
| Code components | Yes — React | No |
| Ideal for | Marketing sites, landing pages, portfolios, agencies | Internal wikis, small public docs, simple links pages |
Pricing Breakdown
Framer pricing
Framer’s free plan includes a hosted subdomain and limited bandwidth — fine for testing but not for production. The Mini plan ($5/mo) adds custom domain and 1,000 visitors/month. The Basic plan ($15/mo) bumps to 10,000 visitors and adds CMS. The Pro plan ($25/mo) covers 100,000 visitors and adds password protection. Higher tiers handle agency-scale traffic. Full breakdown in our Framer pricing guide.
Notion Sites pricing
Notion Sites is free with any Notion workspace, but the free version uses notion.site subdomains and shows Notion branding. To get a custom domain and remove branding, you need Sites Plus at $8/month per Notion seat. If your team already pays for Notion, the marginal cost is small.
Total cost of ownership
For a single landing page, Framer at $5/mo and Notion Sites at $8/mo are comparable. The difference appears at scale. A 50-page marketing site with CMS lives comfortably on Framer’s $25/mo Pro plan. The same site is impractical on Notion Sites because Notion isn’t designed for that volume of structured pages.
Design Flexibility
Framer design capabilities
Framer gives you the full design surface: layouts with absolute and stack positioning, breakpoints for desktop/tablet/mobile, components with variants and overrides, animations on scroll/hover/click, custom typography and colors, and code components for anything the canvas can’t express. You can build any modern marketing site you’ve seen on Awwwards or Sitemark.
Notion Sites design capabilities
Notion Sites takes your Notion page and renders it with the same block styling Notion uses internally. You can change cover images, page width, fonts (limited selection), and colors. You cannot reposition blocks, set custom hover states, animate elements, or build a non-Notion-shaped layout. Every Notion site looks like Notion. That’s the trade-off.
CMS and Content Management
Both platforms have content management, but they’re solving different problems.
Framer’s CMS is a real database — collections with typed fields, references between collections, dynamic pages that template a layout, and an API for external content sources. You can model blog posts with author references, projects with category taxonomies, or product catalogs with variants. Our Framer CMS guide covers the full surface.
Notion’s database-as-CMS is good for simple content but breaks down at scale. You can publish a database as a public page, and individual rows become pages, but you have minimal layout control over how each row renders. For a small blog or a list of resources, it works. For a real content operation with multiple authors, taxonomies, and dynamic templates, Framer wins by a wide margin.
SEO Comparison
SEO is where Framer’s lead is largest. Framer ships:
- Per-page meta titles and descriptions
- Open Graph and Twitter Card configuration
- Schema markup support
- Auto-generated XML sitemaps
- 301 and 302 redirects
- Robots.txt control
- Canonical URLs
Notion Sites supports basic title, description, and OG image. There are no schema controls, no redirect management, no canonical settings, and no programmatic sitemap. For a wiki or internal doc, that’s fine. For a marketing site that needs to rank, it’s a hard ceiling.
Performance is also a factor. Framer pages typically score 90+ on Lighthouse out of the box. Notion pages can be slower to load, particularly when the page contains embedded databases or large images. Framer SEO goes deeper on what’s available.
When Notion Sites Actually Wins
Notion Sites isn’t designed to compete with Framer. It wins in three specific scenarios:
- Internal docs published externally. Engineering wikis, public-facing handbooks, transparency pages where the audience tolerates Notion styling.
- Personal links pages. A simple bio + links page that lives next to your other Notion content.
- Documentation for very small projects. If your project has 5 pages of docs, publishing them from Notion is faster than building docs in Framer or Docusaurus.
Outside those scenarios, Notion Sites is the wrong tool. Trying to use it as a marketing site builder ends in frustration.
When Framer Is the Right Choice
- Marketing sites for SaaS, agencies, or B2B products
- Portfolios for designers, developers, or creative professionals
- Landing pages for paid traffic or campaigns
- E-commerce sites with custom design
- Blogs with dynamic content and authors
- Any site where design quality affects conversion
For more on what Framer handles, see our Framer website design guide or compare against the rest of the field on our comparison hub.
Migration Path
If you’re currently on Notion Sites and outgrowing it, the migration path to Framer is straightforward. Export your Notion content, recreate the structure as Framer CMS collections, and rebuild pages using Framer’s design system. A 20-page Notion site typically takes 1 to 2 weeks to migrate properly.
The hardest part isn’t the content — it’s deciding what design you actually want. Notion gives you no design choices, so most teams haven’t thought about it. Set aside time at the start of the migration to define typography, color, and component patterns.
Which Should You Choose?
For 95 percent of public-facing websites, Framer is the right answer. It’s faster, more flexible, more SEO-friendly, and produces sites that look professional. Notion Sites is a niche product for teams already deep in Notion who need to publish a wiki or simple docs externally.
If you’re choosing between them for a marketing site, brand site, portfolio, or anything client-facing, choose Framer. If you’re publishing internal documentation that just needs to be public, Notion Sites is fine — and free if you already pay for Notion.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Notion Sites be used as a marketing site?
Technically yes, but it’s not advisable. Notion Sites lacks the design flexibility, animations, and SEO controls needed for a competitive marketing site. Most teams who try it migrate to a real builder within months.
Is Framer better than Notion Sites for SEO?
Yes, by a wide margin. Framer ships full SEO controls — schema, redirects, sitemaps, canonical URLs — while Notion Sites supports only basic title and description.
Can I use Notion content as a Framer CMS source?
Indirectly, yes. You can connect Notion as a data source via integrations or by exporting content and importing it into Framer’s CMS. This lets you keep editing in Notion while publishing in Framer.
How much does each platform cost for a custom domain?
Framer’s Mini plan starts at $5/month with custom domain. Notion Sites Plus is $8/month per Notion seat for custom domain.
Which is easier to learn?
Notion Sites is easier if you already know Notion. Framer has a steeper learning curve but offers far more capability. The Framer Academy is free and gets most users productive in 10 to 15 hours.