For most marketing and content sites, Astro is the better default. Next.js is the better fit when the site is really an application with marketing pages attached. Astro ships no JavaScript by default and renders to static HTML, which is exactly what a brochure site, blog or documentation set needs. Next.js is a full React application framework: powerful, but you pay for that power in complexity and runtime weight whether or not the page needs it.

That is the short answer. The rest of this guide is the reasoning, because “it depends” is true but useless, and the decision is more clear-cut than most framework debates suggest. If you want the side-by-side version, our Astro vs Next.js decision guide puts it in a single table.

The core architectural difference

Astro and Next.js solve different problems. The confusion comes from the fact that both can render a homepage.

Next.js is a React framework. Every page is a React component tree, and React’s runtime ships to the browser to “hydrate” that tree so it becomes interactive. That model is right for an app (a dashboard, a configurator, a logged-in product surface) where most of the page is interactive state.

Astro is a content framework with an islands architecture. Pages render to HTML on the server or at build time and ship with no JavaScript unless you explicitly opt a component in. Where you need interactivity (a search box, a carousel, a menu) you mark that one component as an “island,” and only that island ships JavaScript. The rest of the page stays static HTML.

A marketing page is mostly static. The hero, the feature grid, the testimonials and the footer: none of it needs a JavaScript runtime to display. Astro matches the shape of the problem. Next.js makes you ship a framework runtime to render text and images that never change.

Performance: where the gap is widest

The difference shows up directly in Core Web Vitals, which Google uses in its ranking systems and which shape how fast a site feels to the people using it.

JavaScript payload

A static Astro page can ship close to no JavaScript at all. A comparable Next.js page ships the React runtime, the framework’s client bundle and your component code, a sizable baseline before you have written a single feature. More JavaScript means more to download, parse and execute on the main thread, and main-thread work is one of the biggest levers on Interaction to Next Paint (INP), the Core Web Vital that measures responsiveness.

Hydration cost

Because Astro pages are mostly inert HTML, they respond almost as soon as they paint. Next.js pages have to hydrate before their event handlers attach, and on mid-range phones that hydration cost is real. For a content site read mostly on phones, it can be the difference between a page that responds at once and one that stutters.

The honest caveat: a well-optimized Next.js site can score well, and a careless Astro site can still be slow if you load it with heavy images and third-party scripts. Framework choice sets the default and the ceiling. It doesn’t exempt you from the work, which is most of what performance engineering actually is.

Developer experience and complexity

Where Next.js earns its complexity

If your “marketing site” includes a customer portal, an interactive pricing calculator with server-side logic, authenticated content or a genuinely app-like surface, Next.js gives you one coherent model for all of it: routing, data fetching, server components, route handlers and React everywhere. Forcing that into a content framework would be the wrong call.

Where Astro is simpler

For a content site, Astro is far less to reason about. You write HTML-like components, you can drop in React, Vue or Svelte islands if you want them, and you don’t have to think about hydration boundaries, server-versus-client component rules or the framework’s data-fetching conventions. Content lives in Markdown or MDX with a typed schema. The mental model is “a fast site generator that lets me use components,” and for a team that publishes content rather than ships application features, that is the right amount of framework.

Hosting and cost

Astro’s static output deploys to any CDN or static host cheaply and predictably. There is no server to keep warm, and the CDN absorbs traffic spikes. Next.js can also be exported statically for simple cases, but its dynamic features (server rendering, route handlers, image optimization) generally assume a Node runtime or a platform that provides one. That carries operational cost and a dependence on your host that you should choose deliberately rather than inherit.

For a marketing site, the static path is almost always cheaper to run and easier to keep fast under load.

A simple rule for choosing

Write down what the site actually does:

  • If it is content that mostly displays (pages, posts, case studies, docs, landing pages), choose Astro. You get a faster site with less code and lower hosting cost, and you can still add interactive islands where you need them.
  • If it is an application that also has marketing pages (dashboards, accounts, complex stateful interactions across most of the screen), choose Next.js, and treat the marketing pages as part of the app.
  • If you are moving an existing WordPress site mainly for speed and maintainability, Astro is usually the destination. The migration is its own discipline: redirects, content modeling and search continuity matter more than the framework. We cover how we plan it on our WordPress-to-Astro migration page, and Roseville Landscape Material Supply is one site that made that move.

A common mistake is choosing Next.js for a content site because it is the popular default, then spending months fighting hydration and bundle size to win back the performance Astro would have given you by default.

What we recommend in practice

We build content and marketing sites on Astro because the architecture is honest about what those sites are: fast-loading documents with a few interactive moments. When a project is genuinely application-shaped, we scope it as software rather than as a website and choose an application framework to match. The framework should fit the work. Picking one for résumé value or popularity is how sites end up slow and expensive to run.

The decision rule is short: if most of the screen is content, start with Astro; if most of the screen is interactive state, start with an application framework. The right framework is the one you will still be happy with in year three, not the one that demos well in week one.