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This page helps you evaluate Astro as the framework for your next rebuild. If you’re looking for a team to build or migrate an Astro site, see our Astro development services.
What Astro is
Astro is a content-first web framework built around islands architecture: pages render to HTML on the server, and JavaScript ships only for the specific components that need it. The default is zero client-side JS: a page of text and images arrives as exactly that. Content collections give you typed, file-based content out of the box, and first-class integrations connect the same pipeline to a headless CMS, which is what makes it practical as the front end for a consolidated, multi-brand content platform rather than just a blog engine.
The feature that matters most for larger teams: islands can be written in any UI framework (React, Vue, Svelte, Solid), so an existing component investment carries over, and different teams can even mix frameworks on the same site without shipping every runtime to every visitor.
Why it’s our primary pick for content-heavy sites
Most large marketing estates are, at heart, text and images with a few interactive moments: a nav, a form, a pricing toggle. A SPA-shaped framework ships an application runtime to render that; Astro doesn’t. Server-first rendering plus near-zero JavaScript means the performance budget isn’t something you fight for after launch. It’s the starting position, and it holds as editors add pages, because new content doesn’t add client-side weight by default.
For multi-brand publishing, the same content-collections-plus-CMS pipeline scales across sites without each brand inheriting a JS bundle it doesn’t need. One shared component library, many brands, and the lightest possible output per page.
When teams choose it, and when they don’t
| Choose Astro when | Look elsewhere when |
|---|---|
 The build is a marketing or content estate: pages, articles, docs, campaign sites. |  The surface is app-like: dashboards, portals, logged-in product where a client runtime earns its weight. |
| You have hard performance budgets and want Core Web Vitals to hold after launch, not just at it. | Nearly every page is personalized or session-driven, so there's little static output to benefit from. |
| You're publishing across multiple brands or locales from shared content infrastructure. | Your team is standardized on a single React application architecture and wants one runtime end to end. |
| You have existing React, Vue, or Svelte components you want to reuse without shipping a full SPA. | The site depends on deep framework-specific app tooling (complex client state, heavy real-time features) across most pages. |
Pricing, in plain terms
Astro is open source under the MIT license, so there is no product to buy and no per-seat cost. What you pay for is hosting and builds, and Astro keeps both cheap: mostly-static output runs on any CDN or host, server-rendered routes deploy to Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, or your own infrastructure via adapters. Because the output is standard HTML and assets, there’s no runtime that ties you to a single vendor. The growth costs are build minutes and bandwidth, not licensing.
The Bejamas take
Astro is our primary pick when the site is content-heavy and performance matters, which describes most of the rebuilds we see from teams consolidating multiple brands, markets, or legacy CMSs onto one platform. We’re an Astro partner, we build with it daily, and this site runs on it, along with our open-source Astro UI component library. The recommendation comes from production estates, not a benchmark page.
For app-like builds we reach for Next.js instead; the honest dividing line is in Astro vs Next.js. In an audit we model your content shape, interactivity, and team against both and recommend the one that fits. Then, if it’s Astro, we build it.