The Short Answer
If the walls are straight and the framing is right, spec frameless sliding glass doors for your wetroom bathroom and move on. In 2020 I would have told you to default to a framed glass shower enclosure. I was wrong then. I'm not wrong now.
The catch — and there is always a catch — is that frameless shower screens don't forgive mistakes the way framed ones do. The glass itself is fine. It's the wall behind it, the backing behind the tile, and the hardware hanging off the glass that cause 90% of the problems I've personally paid to fix.
Why You Should Believe Me (Or At Least Not Repeat My Screwups)
I handle building materials orders for a mid-size B2B supplier. I've been doing it for going on eight years. I've personally made — and documented — more than a dozen mistakes on shower door specs and wetroom packages, and I can roughly tie $47,000 in wasted budget to those errors. Now I maintain the checklist our team runs before any custom shower door order leaves the desk.
The one that still stings: September 2022. A 27-unit multifamily project, all wetroom bathrooms, all frameless bathtub sliding doors. Total package around $38K. Glass cut, hardware picked, shipped. Installer called from the third floor on day two: the studs behind the wet wall were 24" on center, not 16".
Ten-millimeter frameless panels weigh somewhere between 75 and 85 pounds each. The clamps and hinges holding them need real blocking. At 24" OC, we weren't getting it.
Redo cost: $6,400. Schedule slip: 11 days. I got a very calm, very unpleasant phone call from the GC.
What Actually Goes Wrong With Custom Shower Doors
Here's the part nobody writes about in the pretty product pages.
Frameless systems have almost zero tolerance. Framed systems give you maybe a quarter inch of slack. That's the whole game.
So when someone asks me "frameless or framed," the honest answer is: it depends on the wall, not on the look. A frameless shower screen in a wetroom with a wavy wall is a future callback. Full stop.
The pre-order checklist we run now looks like this:
- Wall plumb check — 6-foot level, at least four points across the opening. Anything past 1/8" out and frameless is off the table.
- Blocking / stud spacing — verify on site, don't trust the drawing. We learned this the $6,400 way.
- Finished tile thickness — this one gets people every single time. The order says 10mm glass with a 60mm channel, but the opening you actually have is glass size minus tile minus thinset. A 3mm mistake in tile thickness has voided entire orders I've overseen.
- Floor slope — wetroom bathrooms want about 1/4" per foot toward the drain. If the subfloor is dead flat, water runs under the bottom seal and out the door.
- Door swing direction — even frameless sliding glass doors need lateral bracing at the track. People forget this.
Counterintuitive thing I've learned the hard way: the glass is the least fragile part of a frameless shower screen. Tempered glass is tempered glass — it's a commodity, it's predictable, it's spec'd by code. The hinges, rollers, and seals are what fail. We once tried to shave cost with a cheaper sliding hardware kit. Fourteen months in, the seals had yellowed and the rollers started catching. Replacing them meant removing the panel, and the labor bill was more than the hardware savings. Twice over.
Why 2020 Advice Doesn't Apply in 2025
I have mixed feelings about how fast this category has moved. On one hand, it's genuinely better for buyers. On the other, half the spec sheets on the market still describe the 2019 version of these products.
Five years ago, frameless was expensive and the hardware wasn't reliable. Framed glass shower enclosures were the rational default for any commercial job or mid-tier residential build. The price gap was 30-40%, and the frameless systems had a reputation for sagging after a couple of years.
That's changed. PVD-coated and brushed stainless sliding systems have closed most of the durability gap. The cost delta has narrowed to something like 15-20% on comparable specs. In a wetroom bathroom, where you often can't fit a swinging door anyway, frameless sliding glass doors stopped being a luxury pick and started being the sensible one.
What hasn't changed: cheap hardware is still cheap hardware. Anything under a certain price point fails in wet environments. Chrome plating flakes. Aluminum tracks pit. Seals go gummy. I'd rather see someone step down to a framed enclosure than step down on the hardware holding a frameless one up.
When Framed Is Still the Right Answer
I don't want this to read like "frameless or bust." Three cases where I'd still spec framed, no hesitation:
1. The wall is out and fixing it costs more than the upgrade. I can only speak to the projects we handle, but on retrofits where the tile is already set, strapping and re-finishing the wall to frameless tolerance has run 2-3x the door cost. Not worth it.
2. Budget is genuinely tight. Framed glass shower enclosures are still meaningfully cheaper, and a well-built framed unit will outlast a badly-built frameless one every time.
3. High-turnover, high-abuse use cases. Gyms, dormitories, short-term rental stacks. Framed systems take a beating and are cheaper to service. Aesthetics lose to durability here, and that's fine.
People think "modern" automatically means frameless. Actually, the project's constraints decide. Sometimes the modern answer is framed — you just don't see it on Instagram.
The One Thing I'd Change About My Own Process
I used to quote custom shower doors from drawings. Now I ask for a site visit first, every time, even when it slows the quote down. The single check that's paid for itself most often: stud spacing and blocking, verified with a probe before the waterproofing goes up.
That one step would have saved me $6,400 and an 11-day delay in September 2022. It's saved us from at least a dozen repeat versions of the same mistake since.
This worked for us, but our situation is that we're handling North American commercial and mid-to-high-end residential orders with predictable specs. If you're dealing with high-rise, international logistics, or fully custom architectural glazing, there are probably factors here I'm not aware of. Take the frame with a grain of salt — but take the site visit seriously.