Framer CMS Limitations: What Real Users Are Running Into (2026)

The Data Tells a Clear Story

We scraped 1,199 posts from the Framer community support forum. After categorizing every thread, one pattern stood out: CMS issues were the single biggest category. Not design questions. Not billing complaints. CMS.

The posts range from users who cannot get basic filtering to work, to developers hitting architectural walls trying to build anything beyond a simple blog. These are not edge cases. They are the same problems, reported over and over by different people.

The 5 CMS Problems People Hit Most

After grouping the threads by topic, five categories emerged. Each one represents a fundamental limitation of how Framer's CMS is built, not a temporary bug waiting for a fix.

1. Filtering and sorting are painfully limited

The most common CMS complaint on the forum is about filtering. Users want to let visitors filter content by category, tag, price range, or other attributes. Framer's built-in filtering is basic, and when it works at all, it breaks in unexpected ways inside components.

The pattern here is clear. Users need real filtering (multi-select, range-based, combined filters) and Framer's CMS does not support it natively. Checkbox filters break inside components. Sorting requires the Framer app itself. There is no client-side filtering API. Every workaround is fragile.

2. Multi-referencing is broken

CMS multi-referencing lets you link one collection item to multiple items in another collection. Think: a blog post tagged with multiple categories, or a product linked to several features. This is a basic relational data feature. In Framer, it is broken.

When multi-referencing does not work reliably, you cannot build category systems, tag-based navigation, or any content structure that requires many-to-many relationships. This forces users into workarounds like duplicating content or flattening their data model, which defeats the purpose of having a CMS.

3. Pagination is unreliable and not SEO-friendly

If you have more than a handful of CMS items, you need pagination. Framer's pagination support is limited, and the issues compound when you need it to work with SEO.

The user asking about 8,000+ detail pages captures the core problem. Framer's CMS was designed for small sites with dozens of items, not for content-heavy sites that need crawlable, paginated archives. Numerical pagination overrides break. SEO-friendly pagination requires workarounds that Framer does not natively support.

4. Items disappear or refuse to link

This category is the most frustrating because it involves content that stops appearing or linking correctly, often without any obvious reason.

When you duplicate a collection, links break. New items appear only as drafts. Items vanish from the page entirely. You cannot delete fields even after removing all connections. These are not user errors. They are symptoms of a CMS that tracks internal state in ways that are opaque and fragile.

5. CMS variables and content break unexpectedly

CMS variables let you pull dynamic content into your designs. When they break, your site shows broken placeholders or nothing at all.

The post titled "CMS Issues" was posted just 38 minutes before we captured the data. The vagueness of "Problem with CMS?" tells its own story: users often cannot even identify what went wrong because the CMS behavior is unpredictable. Variables break, rich text formatting produces inconsistent spacing, and the general "CMS Issues" thread keeps getting new replies.

Why These Are Not Fixable in Framer

It is tempting to think these are bugs that Framer will eventually fix. They are not. They are architectural limitations built into how Framer's CMS works.

Framer's CMS is not a database. It is a content layer bolted onto a visual design tool. It works well for sites with 20 to 50 items and simple listing pages. Once you need real filtering, complex relationships, or thousands of pages, you are fighting the architecture rather than building your site. CMS is just one category -- we cover every constraint in our complete Framer limitations guide.

Even the more advanced requests from the community hit the same wall:

Conditional visibility based on user attributes, mixed content types, next/previous navigation with filters, complex layout patterns -- none of these are possible in a system without a query layer. Users keep asking because the features seem basic. They are basic. But not in Framer's architecture.

What Changes When You Own the Code

When you export your Framer site to code and connect it to a headless CMS, every single problem listed above disappears. Not because the code is magic, but because you now have access to the tools that solve these problems trivially.

The math is straightforward. Framer charges $25/month for a 10,000-item cap. Supabase gives you 50,000 rows for free with a real Postgres database, full SQL access, and an auto-generated API. Contentful offers 25,000 records on its free tier. You get more capacity, more flexibility, and zero CMS limitations -- for less money.