Both are hosted platforms, so there is no server to manage, and both let a business run its own website after launch. The similarity mostly ends there. One starts from design and content; the other starts from products, orders and payments.
Comparing them feature by feature misses that. The better question is what the website mostly has to do, day to day, for this particular business.
Webflow starts from design and content
Webflow is a visual tool for building websites, with close control over layout, type and animation, and a content system for things like articles, case studies and team pages. It suits marketing sites, portfolios and content-led brands. It does include commerce features, though selling is not its main focus.
Content editors can update collections without touching the design, which suits teams that publish often. The trade-off is that large catalogues, stock and fulfilment are not what it was designed around.
Shopify starts from the store
Shopify is built around products, inventory, checkout, orders and customers. Themes control the look, and a large ecosystem of apps adds features such as subscriptions, reviews and shipping tools. It suits businesses whose website exists mainly to sell, and those that need stock, orders and fulfilment in one place.
Themes can be customised a long way, and deeper changes need a developer who knows the platform. Store staff can run daily operations such as orders and stock without touching the design at all.
Look at the next few years
List what the business will sell, how many products and variants, which payment methods and delivery partners it needs, and how much of the site is editorial content. A brand with a handful of products and a lot of storytelling has different needs from a catalogue of hundreds of items with frequent stock changes.
Consider who will run the site day to day. A marketing team editing stories and a sales team managing stock need different tools.
Sometimes it is both
Some businesses run a content-rich brand site on one platform and the store on another, linked under the same domain. That gives each part the tool it suits, at the cost of two systems to maintain and two places to keep the brand consistent. It is worth it only when both halves are substantial.
When one half is small, it is usually simpler to keep everything on the platform that suits the larger half. Fewer systems mean fewer logins, bills and places for things to break.
