Join the Webstudio community

Updated last month

Ycode Review: Initial Thoughts on Pricing, Performance, and More

At a glance

The community member has been testing Ycode and shares their initial thoughts. They find the pricing, performance, built-in CMS, and localization features to be good. However, they note some issues with file format support, bugs, layers overview, and breakpoints/zoom functionality. They also feel the community and support could be more hands-on. Overall, they see Ycode as a promising tool but not mature enough for their needs yet.

In the comments, another community member compares Ycode to Webstudio, noting that Ycode has a cleaner dashboard and better built-in localization, while Webstudio offers more QoL UX features and a planned CSS Grid UI. They also discuss the CMS capabilities of both tools. One commenter mentions that Webstudio allows disabling atomic classes to reduce code size, and there is a proposal to generate native CSS mixins to avoid duplication.

I’ve been testing Ycode for a short time, and here are my initial thoughts I shared on their chat:

Pricing: Good and highly competitive.
Performance: It’s fast.
Built-in CMS: Looks promising and well-implemented.
Built-in Localization: Also, looks decent and very well-implemented.
Roadmap Transparency: Great to see some clarity with a roadmap— this is much appreciated!
UI and Design: The Ycode UI and overall web design are fantastic.
File Format Support:
  • No mention of .avif support, only .webp. Why is that?
  • No support for .woff or .woff2, only .ttf, which has been the web standard for nearly a decade.
Bugs: Spotted a minor dropdown menu bug (already reported in the Bugs-section here). It’s not critical, just a small annoyance. Also, I see some people on the forums struggling with a crashing builder, so this might be stuff they have to iron out.
Layers Overview: The “Blocks” don’t adopt the Layer Style name, which clutters the overview with generic “Block” labels. Over time, this makes navigation confusing. This could greatly improve UX imo.
Breakpoints and Zoom: This is my biggest issue: while the zoom functionality is handy, I really need a consistent 1:1 (100%) zoom while designing. Why doesn’t the “All screens/Desktop” view fit the width of the main-view? A simple width-adjust UI element on the side would help. Additionally, when I press “Preview” and return, it reverts to auto-fit. While auto-fit might sound like it ensures responsiveness, it actually just zooms out and makes everything smaller. TL;DR: A 100% zoom lock combined with auto-fit responsiveness in the main-view would be ideal for me. That said, I understand this may be subjective.
Community & Support: For a small team I was hoping they would be a little more 'hands on', not getting a decent answer to everything.

Overall, good, but not mature enough for me yet. I’m excited to see how Ycode evolves in the future.
B
T
6 comments
Anything in particular you see better implemented in ycode than in webstudio?
Keep in mind that I haven’t used either tool extensively.

  • The dashboard is somewhat cleaner and I think I prefer the overal aesthetic of Ycode, though that's subjective. When you start working I rather have the little QoL UX features Webstudio offers. Plus, Webstudio literally has just refreshed its UI, so…!
  • It supports Safari. But it's barely an inconvenience to jump to another browser so, who cares.
  • Built-in Localization: From what I understand, in Webstudio, you need to manually create each locale URL (unless there’s a method I haven’t discovered yet or you use a cms). Ycode takes the lead in this area.
  • They have a built-in Interactions panel, it's limited but nice to have.
  • A CSS Grid UI. I see this is planned for Webstudio and you can already achieve this through Style > Advanced tho.
  • Ycode has its own CMS. I know the core idea of Webstudio is its flexibility to integrate with any CMS I prefer. Recently, the client content mode was released here, which is an excellent addition! I checked, and this content mode would suffice for about a third of my current (Webflow) projects. However, for the rest, I’d still need a dedicated CMS. I believe having a lightweight CMS built into Webstudio would be a great addition, but that perspective might change once I find an easy-to-set-up CMS that aligns with my needs. So far, I haven’t found a CMS that fully meets my expectations, but I’m still testing stuff. As explained to me before, linking a standalone CMS is the best approach if your client aims to scale in the future. So I might change my mind on this matter 🙂 We'll see.
  • Publishing is faster
  • Dark mode
  • I haven't really compared how the final code output is between the 2. Ycode seems a little cleaner on the front-end while Webstudio gives elements a w-heading c1wxfjkq c1h2gdkn c1p0zat7 ci98o7f cb72b94 c16neqcj c1je2j4m row of classes, but this might just be the token design that Webstudio uses that I don't fully understand yet.
You can disable atomic classes in project settings. Compiler will generate then only two classes for preset and instance.
I see! Not familiar with atomic css, I'll read up on it, thanks
Ooh, basically reduces the size at the cost of readability. Great that Webstudio gives us the choice.
In the future we will generate native css mixins to avoid duplication from tokens. Though it is only proposal for now.
Add a reply
Sign up and join the conversation on Discord