“Let’s go with Next.js, it’s the fashionable stack.” In 2024 that was a decent answer. In 2026 it is the worst reason there is. Here is the honest decision matrix.
Webflow — when it fits
A marketing site up to fifty pages. A non-technical team that wants to edit on its own without calling a developer to change a price. A solid visual CMS. Against: pricing that climbs fast with traffic, heavy lock-in, limited customisation beyond the standard.
Verdict: ideal for 80% of B2C brands up to 20,000 visitors a month.
Next.js — when it fits
A complex site with real business logic — calculators, member areas, heavy multilingual setups, custom CRM integrations. A team with at least one senior developer. You keep full ownership of the code, you can extend without limit, and you pay a fair price for hosting.
Verdict: for brands with genuine business requirements, or planning to grow.
Shopify — when it fits
You sell physical products. Full stop. Everything else is secondary. Shopify dominates e-commerce because nobody does the fundamentals better: checkout, payment, stock, fulfilment.
For a pure marketing site Shopify is the wrong call. For e-commerce it is almost always the right one.
The simple rule
“Choose the stack for whoever will edit the site in eighteen months, not for whoever will build it in six weeks.”
The cost of a stack is measured over five years. Development is 10% of the total; editing, maintenance and evolution are the other 90%.