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Pinegrow / Webflow / Bootstrap Studio as a professional tool?

Kevin C.'s photo
Kevin C.
·Oct 5, 2018

As a frontend dev, do you think there might be a place in your toolbox as a developer for visual coding tools such as Pinegrow (pinegrow.com), Webflow (webflow.com), or Bootstrap Studio (bootstrapstudio.io) for development work? Am I missing out on vastly improved productivity and efficiency if I don't take advantage of those tools?

I've been struggling to figure this out. Right now, I code by hand in a code editor, but I sometimes wonder whether I am missing out by not "thinking outside the box," not questioning the industry status quo and not using one of these tools. I have been trying all of them for the last couple of days. I haven't found them to be notably more efficient than coding by hand so far, but I am not sure whether it is merely because I haven't spent enough time doing things differently or because they really aren't as good as they claim.

Webflow folks, in particular, seem to insist that it is the way of the future and frontend coding will be mostly automated. They talk as if coding HTML and CSS by hand is a lost cause and developers sometimes hate on them because they think like Luddites and modern visual tools threaten developers' status quo. Is there some truth to that?