Locking Down the Client Editor, Platform by Platform

Every agency has met the same failure. A client opens the editor to change a phone number, drags something a few pixels, and the layout you spent a week on is subtly ruined on mobile only, discovered three weeks later by someone else.

The fix is a restricted editing role, and the good news is that every platform on this rack now has one. The less good news is that they differ in two ways that matter enormously: how narrow the restriction is, and whether it is a permission the platform enforces or a convention you are relying on the client to respect.

This sheet compares what each publishes. Read on 21 September 2026.

Wix Studio: content mode, and it is the right shape

Wix's answer is called content mode, and Wix describes it as giving clients controlled editing access to update copy and media safely.

That is exactly the correct division of the problem. Text and images are the things clients legitimately need to change; structure, spacing and breakpoints are the things they should not be able to touch. A mode that exposes the first set and hides the second solves the actual failure rather than working around it.

Alongside it, Wix's agency page describes role-based permissions in general terms: defining roles for different stakeholders, granting project-specific permissions, and providing administrative controls. The project-scoped part is the valuable half — a client or contractor with access to one site should not see the other thirty-nine in your workspace.

How deep content mode goes in practice — exactly which properties are exposed and which are locked — is the kind of detail that only becomes clear on a production site, and this desk has not built one in it. So this describes the published claim rather than grading the implementation. The wider reading of Wix's agency page is on the Wix Studio agency sheet.

Duda: role-based permissions, from the Agency plan

Duda's client-management page describes role-based permissions and role-based access control, and places them from the Agency plan onward — $52 a month billed annually, $69 monthly. Alongside them sit inline comments and live previews for client feedback inside the editor, described at the same tier.

Two things about that placement. First, it means permissions are a reason to move from Team to Agency, where seats are not — both tiers carry six seats. Second, it puts the granular control behind a tier that also carries code export and four included projects, so the upgrade tends to make sense for several reasons at once rather than one.

Duda also names something most platforms skip: a client-facing content collection experience, used to gather business information before a site is built. That is a different problem from restricting an editor, but it is the same underlying instinct — give the client a bounded surface rather than the whole tool.

Webflow: the Editor role, and the permissions that cost $49

Webflow separates the two halves further apart than anyone else, and the gap is worth understanding before you budget.

Seats are one purchase. A limited seat is $15 a month billed yearly, a full seat is $39, and reviewer or commenter access is free. A client who only needs to comment costs nothing.

But site-level roles and publishing permissions arrive on the Growth workspace at $49 a month billed yearly. Below that, on the free Starter workspace or on Core at $19, you can add people but you cannot finely control which of them is allowed to publish to a live client site. So the answer to "can I restrict what my client does in Webflow" is yes, at $49 a month on the workspace layer, on top of whatever site plans you are already paying.

That is not unreasonable pricing for what it does. It is just a different shape from every other platform here, and a studio that budgeted seats and not the workspace tier will find the control it wanted sitting behind a line it did not plan for.

Framer: content editors as a priced role

Framer's version is the most literal: a content editor is a distinct seat type at $10 a month, restricted to CMS, localisation and on-page editing, against a design editor at $20. Viewers are free on every plan.

That is a clean model — the restriction is the product you are buying, not a setting you have to remember to apply. It is also the cheapest way to give a client editing access anywhere on this rack.

The limit is the ceiling rather than the role: ten users with edit access on both Basic and Pro. For a studio with many clients each wanting one editor login, ten arrives faster than expected, and it is not solved by a tier upgrade short of Enterprise.

Squarespace: contributors, per site

Squarespace's model is different in kind because the subscription usually belongs to the client rather than to you. Access is granted per site through contributor permissions at defined levels.

The practically important part is the far end of it. Squarespace's Circle page states that your client can become the website owner and keep, limit, or remove your access if they choose. That is a permission model that ends with the client holding the keys, which is the correct answer for a one-off build and a slightly uncomfortable one for a retained relationship where you are responsible for a site you can be locked out of.

No seat prices are published because seats are not the unit. The trade-off is set out at length on agency plan or a plan per client.

Enforced, or merely suggested?

This is the question to actually ask a vendor, because marketing pages rarely answer it.

An enforced restriction is one the platform will not let the user past. The controls are absent from their interface; there is no setting to find. Wix's content mode and Framer's content-editor seat are described this way, and Duda's role-based access control is described in the same language.

A suggested restriction is one where the user technically has the capability and is expected not to use it — a shared admin login with a polite instruction, or a role that hides a menu without removing the underlying permission. These fail eventually, and they fail at the worst moment, because the person who breaks the layout is never the person you had the conversation with.

The test is simple: ask the vendor whether a user in the restricted role can change layout at all, in any view, on any breakpoint, by any route. A precise yes or no is a real permission model. A reassuring paragraph is not.

What to actually do

Give clients the narrowest role that lets them do the two things they genuinely need, which in nearly every case is editing text and swapping images. Anything wider is generosity that will be repaid with a support call.

Put the free viewer role to work. Most client-side stakeholders never need to edit anything; they need to look and to comment. Webflow and Framer both make that free, and paying full seats for people who only look is the commonest waste on an agency bill.

Write down what the role permits in the handover note. Not because the client will read it, but because in four months when something has changed, you will both want to know what was possible.

Which platforms enforce properly and what they charge for it is folded into the ranking on the best website builder for agencies rack, where permissions are one of the four things being scored.