Netlify Retires Its Visual Editor Feb. 8 and Points Teams to Agents

Netlify deprecated its Visual Editor on Nov. 10 and will shut it off Feb. 8, 2027, so any team whose marketers or clients edit pages through it has about three months to move them to a CMS or to Netlify’s prompt-driven Agent Runners (Netlify changelog, Nov. 10, 2026).

What Changed

As of Nov. 10, no new team or project can turn on Visual Editor. Teams that already use it can keep going until Feb. 8, 2027, when Netlify said the product will no longer be available or supported. Netlify said sites stay live and content stays where it is; only the editing workflow goes away.

Visual Editor was previously called Netlify Create. It came from Stackbit, which Netlify said it acquired in a June 29, 2023 press release that pitched the tool as a way for marketers and other non-developers to edit sites in real time from a browser. In the deprecation notice, Netlify said the editor “was designed before prompting updates was a common way people worked.”

Where Editors Go Next

Teams that already edit content in a CMS keep editing there, and Netlify said nothing changes for them. Teams using Claude or Codex can point the agent at netlify.ai for the skills and tools it needs to work on a Netlify project. Teams that want to stay inside Netlify can type the change into Agent Runners, which shows a side-by-side preview and puts nothing live until someone publishes.

That last route costs money. Agent Runners runs on credits, so Netlify said it needs a credit-based plan or an Enterprise plan that uses credits. Teams on a legacy plan have to switch plans first.

What to Do

Check whether any project has Visual Editor enabled and who uses it. If the editors are developers, the change is minor. If they are a client’s marketing staff, pick the replacement now, and if it’s Agent Runners, price the plan change before February rather than after the editor goes dark.

The Take

This is Firerun’s read, not Netlify’s. A WYSIWYG editor and a prompt box are not the same tool for the same person. Visual Editor let a non-developer click a headline and retype it, and Netlify pitched it at that user in 2023. Agent Runners asks the same person to describe a change in words and review a preview, and Netlify bills it in credits. For agencies that sold Netlify sites with in-browser editing included, that is a new line item to explain.

Netlify made the call on the same day it put Netlify Server, a runtime for long-running backends with WebSockets, into early access. Netlify’s recent launches point at backends and agents, and a 2023 acquisition aimed at marketers no longer fits that plan.