My Framer beefs 2025.

Here we are Framer fans it’s 2025. Another year of amazing releases and improvements to a product that has changed the career trajectory of who knows how many designs and devs. 

Chances are that if you’re reading this then you love Framer but also like every product you have some gripes with it. I did my first Framer Beefs last year and it’s now time for the 2025 edition. Some of these are repeats from 2024, just because time has past does not mean that it is no longer an issue. The list has grown so strap in for a meaty read.

Pricing

Let’s start with the big one that is a very hot topic right now. Framer’s pricing has changed multiple times since 2023. Earlier shifts were easier to rationalise for a growing platform, but the latest release is being promoted as a win while many smaller users feel squeezed. The Mini tier is no longer offered. Basic now lists only 1 CMS collection, which is a step down from older pricing many of us remember. 

Editor seats include just one per site, with additional editors billed at $20 on Basic and $40 on Pro or Scale, which makes client collaboration more costly. Selling these increases to customers is harder, and concern across the community is clear. In some regions the effective cost will be higher still once currency and taxes are factored in. Frequent pricing changes create uncertainty; if users feel pushed too far, they will look elsewhere.

Text styles

Framer’s new folder support for styles is a welcome touch; it finally brings some tidiness to the chaos. That said, there is still work to be done. Even with plugins, creating scalable text styles remains unnecessarily tedious.

When setting up text styles, you define your elements (H1, H2, P), font, weight, spacing, and size. Framer does let you assign different font sizes for each breakpoint, which is great until you need to create another style. Duplicating an existing one does not carry over those breakpoint-specific sizes, forcing you to re-enter them manually. To make matters worse, you cannot change the style type. Duplicate an H1 and want it to become an H2? No luck; you will have to rebuild it from scratch.

My current workaround is to stick with paragraph styles and manually assign heading tags later. It is not ideal, but it lets me preserve font, colour, and balance settings. Still, the breakpoint sizes? Manual entry every time. Tedious.

Fixes

Make duplication smarter and let it copy everything, including breakpoint font sizes. When duplicating, give us the option to change the heading type. If I duplicate an H1, I should be able to instantly switch it to an H2 while keeping all other properties intact.

Improvements

Built-in scaling options for font sizing would be a game-changer. Right now, I rely on Utopia to generate type scales and then manually recreate that logic in Framer. Imagine if Framer allowed scalable type per breakpoint, with both fixed and REM-based options. It would streamline workflows and make managing responsive typography far more intuitive.

Collection filtering

Collections in the CMS have become far more powerful since referencing and multi-referencing were introduced. However, displaying that data with filters or sorting remains a complete headache. Why on earth do we still have to build component-based filtering? It is time-consuming at best, and when working with a collection of more than thirty items, it becomes virtually unmanageable. We should not have to build out variants on a canvas just to achieve basic filtering functionality.

Fixes

Introduce a native filtering element that handles the heavy lifting for users. Essentially, Superfields have already built what Framer needs. Framer should either acquire them or recreate the functionality natively and it should not come as an additional cost.

Media management in the CMS

The whole point of a CMS is efficiency. It allows global changes to be made quickly and easily. So why do imagery and video still feel like an afterthought? If you want to use an image in more than one place, you either have to upload it multiple times or dedicate a valuable collection purely to manage media. It works, but it is far from ideal.

The next issue comes when selecting which image to use. The reference lists are text-based, so once you have more than ten images, it becomes difficult and time-consuming to tell which one is which. It is fiddly, slow, and simply bad UX.

Fixes

The ideal solution would be a dedicated media library within the CMS (included on all plans) where users can manage images, videos, and files in one place. It should support folder structures, file renaming and replacing, alt text management, and search. Users should then be able to reference media anywhere in the CMS visually, including in the rich text editor. This would also benefit Framer by reducing redundant uploads and saving server space.

Redirects

This came up recently with a client project. Their site had plenty of traffic, but the structure was a mess. We rebuilt the architecture so it actually made sense and planned to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones using Framer’s built-in redirect settings.

Turns out, Framer’s redirects have their limits. They work fine for simple path changes within the same site, but if you are dealing with a bigger migration, cross-domain redirects, or a large number of old URLs, things start to fall apart. In our case, we had to use external tools to get everything working properly.

Fixes

Be clearer in the pricing and support documentation about what Framer’s redirects can and cannot do. It saves a lot of confusion later on.

Improvements

Build a proper redirect system that can handle more complex setups, such as domain-to-domain redirects or bulk URL management. Basically, something that works reliably when you are managing a real-world website, not just a small test project.

Handling imagery via the rich text editor in the CMS

The rich text editor is typically used for blog posts, as it allows you to add media such as images and videos alongside formatted text. However, the way the text editor handles images still needs attention. When I add an image to the text editor, there is very limited control over its appearance. There are image styles, but these only allow adjustments to the radius and shadow. There is no control over padding or alignment.

In addition, only one image style can be applied per text editor, which means it is not possible to use multiple image styles within the same block of content. The biggest issue, though, is image sizing. Adding images via the rich text editor feels unpredictable. If you size them to fit the full width, they often fill only three-quarters of the space. I still cannot understand why an image that is 2560px wide only fills a third of a container that is 1113px wide.

Fixes

Add padding and alignment controls to image styles, and allow these styles to be applied to individual images within the text editor. It would also be helpful to have container rules for images, so that the width can be set to fill and the height to scale, similar to how it works in Framer’s regular design environment.

Nice to have

The option to add and style image captions would be a very welcome addition, as this is standard in most CMS platforms.

Bullet and numbered list styling

Clients love bullet points. They want them on their websites; it’s just one of those things. You’d think this would be straightforward in Framer, and to some extent it is, but the functionality is quite limited. If you want to customise the styling of a list, you are out of luck. There is no way to adjust the list’s inset or spacing, which often results in unattractive, hard-to-read layouts, particularly when there is a lot of text.

In the past, I have had to ‘hack’ lists by creating a series of stacks with one bullet point in each. This gives me some control over styling, but it is clearly an accessibility no-no.

Fixes

Add the ability to insert and style lists properly, including options for list spacing and inset values, so we can easily create visually balanced, readable lists. Include bullet and numbered list buttons in the properties menu.

Nice to have

Do not assume every numbered list should start at 1. If I begin a list at 20, I still want the numbering to function correctly. It would also be great to have the option to change the colour of the bullet or number independently from the text.

Download button

A helpful little button that can be customised to suit your design. Great. It works well. However, there is one major flaw. When you download a file, its original name is replaced with a random string of letters and numbers. This completely disrupts the user journey, as it immediately creates doubt about the file’s legitimacy. Should the user open it? Is it safe?

Fix

Keep the original file name, please and thank you.

Password protection

At present, you can only password protect an entire website. While this works for some cases, in many situations you only want to protect a single page or a subsection of a site.

Fix

Allow password protection for individual web pages. I appreciate this may be a complex request with plenty of variables to consider, but it is a highly requested feature within the Framer community.

What’s still missing

Framer’s release pace is incredible, and I am constantly impressed by the quality of their updates. However, a few fundamental features are still missing.

Shadow styles

To be able to have consistent control over shadow styling would be cool (because shadows cause shade so you’d be…). At present, if you create a three-stage shadow, you have to manually copy and paste those settings each time you use them. Making global changes is slow and repetitive. Introducing shadow styles would be an easy and worthwhile win for Framer.

Tokens

Setting up styles remains one of the most time-consuming parts of any project. I currently work from a mostly blank template that includes my preferred text, colour, and link styles, along with standard breakpoints and grids. However, there are plenty of times when the template doesn’t fit the project, and I still end up spending a fair bit of time readjusting everything.

A token-based style manager in Framer would make this process far more efficient. Imagine being able to tweak styles in a simple table, press update, and have those changes instantly applied across the project.

This would not only speed up global changes but could also lay the groundwork for proper design system management within Framer. Given Framer’s recent push to attract larger corporations, introducing a token system could be a significant draw. I have worked on design systems that supported hundreds of sites for a single company, requiring collaboration between large design and development teams. The potential cost savings of achieving similar results with just a few Framer developers would be huge for businesses. Perhaps a collaboration with Tokens Studio would be a good fit?

PDF viewer

At present, Framer only allows users to download PDFs, with no option to open them directly in the browser. This feels like such an easy win and would make for a much smoother user experience.

What have I missed?

That’s all I’ve got. Please share this article on your socials. The more we push for change the greater chance we have of getting the Framer gods to listen. Thanks to Thomas Michalik for his input on this article.

What would you like to see Framer fix, change or implement? Drop me a message.