Astro vs Next.js: Which Headless Stack for a Marketing Site?

Astro for a marketing site, Next.js when you need an application. That is the honest answer for most businesses. Astro ships static HTML with no JavaScript by default, which suits content and campaign pages. Next.js earns its extra weight when your site has logins, dashboards or genuinely interactive features.

Quick links

• What actually separates them
• Which one is actually faster?
• Which is better for SEO and getting cited by AI?
• What is it like for the people editing the site?
• What each one costs
• When Next.js is genuinely the right call
• So which should you choose?
• FAQ

What actually separates them

Astro is a framework for content. Next.js is a framework for applications that often also has content bolted on.

Astro’s own documentation is refreshingly unambiguous about this. It describes itself as “the web framework for building content-driven websites like blogs, marketing, and e-commerce”. Next.js, by contrast, is built around React and grew up serving product teams shipping software. Both will render a page about your services. They arrive there by very different routes, and those routes have consequences for speed, cost and who can safely touch the site.

The mechanism that matters is Astro’s islands architecture. Every page renders to static HTML with no client-side runtime. If a specific component needs to be interactive, you mark it with a client: directive and only that component ships JavaScript. A pricing page with twelve sections and one calculator sends the browser the calculator and nothing else.

Next.js starts from the other end. React is the foundation, so the React runtime comes along whether the page needs it or not. Recent versions have got much better at this. Partial Prerendering, now the default under Cache Components, builds a static HTML shell at build time and streams only the genuinely dynamic parts at request time. It is a real improvement. It is still a framework working hard to be static, rather than one that is static unless told otherwise.

Which one is actually faster?

Astro, on a typical marketing site, by a margin that is visible rather than academic.

Astro claims an Astro site can load 40% faster with 90% less JavaScript than the same site built in the most popular React framework. Treat a framework’s own numbers with the scepticism they deserve, but the direction is right and the reason is structural. You cannot be slowed down by JavaScript you never sent.

Where this bites is responsiveness. Since March 2024, Interaction to Next Paint has been a Core Web Vital, replacing First Input Delay. INP measures every interaction on the page rather than just the first, and it is unforgiving about main-thread work. Heavy hydration is exactly the kind of work it punishes. A page that ships almost no JavaScript has very little to get wrong.

The practical version: we rebuilt a client’s site and their PageSpeed score went from 34 to 86. The first inbound lead arrived within 24 hours. The full HOC story has the detail, but the shape of it is common. Most slow marketing sites are not slow because of one bad decision. They are slow because a stack that assumed heavy interactivity got used for pages that never needed any.

A well-optimised Next.js site can absolutely be fast. The difference is that in Astro, fast is where you start. In Next.js, fast is where you end up if you keep paying attention. Teams are good at paying attention for about six months.

Which is better for SEO and getting cited by AI?

Neither framework earns you rankings. What Astro does is make the conditions for both search and AI citation the default instead of a project.

Google does not have a preference between the two. It has a preference for pages that load quickly and can be read without executing anything. That second part is where the gap widens. Most AI crawlers read the initial HTML response and do not run JavaScript. If your content only materialises after hydration, the crawler sees a shell. Astro’s output is finished HTML, so there is nothing to miss.

Next.js can produce exactly the same result. Server-side render or statically generate the page and the HTML is complete. The risk is not that Next.js cannot do it, it is that Next.js lets you not do it. A client component slipped into the wrong place, a data fetch moved to the browser for convenience, and a page that was crawlable last quarter quietly is not. Nobody notices until traffic dips.

Structured data, clean heading hierarchy and answer-shaped content matter far more than either framework. We have written about how the stack choice plays into search visibility in more detail. The short version: the framework sets your floor, your content sets your ceiling.

What is it like for the people editing the site?

Roughly the same, because in both cases the editing happens somewhere else.

This is the point most comparisons get wrong. Neither Astro nor Next.js is a CMS. Both are front ends that pull content from wherever you keep it, so the editor experience is a question about your CMS, not your framework. Sanity, Storyblok, Contentful and Payload all work fine with either.

What does differ is the developer experience, and that reaches marketing eventually. Astro components are close to HTML, which means a broader set of people can make a safe change. Next.js is React, so it needs React skills. If your team already writes React every day, that is an advantage, not a cost. If they do not, you have narrowed the group of people who can edit a landing page to whoever is free.

What each one costs

Astro is cheaper to build and cheaper to run for a marketing site. Next.js costs more, and that is often justified.

Build cost tracks complexity. Static pages with a handful of interactive components take less time to write and considerably less time to test than an application with server actions, caching strategies and per-user rendering. On hosting, static output sits on a CDN and costs almost nothing at the traffic a typical B2B site sees. Next.js server features need somewhere to run, which is a real bill, and one that scales with success.

The trap is paying application prices for a brochure. Plenty of marketing sites run on infrastructure specified for something they are not doing. If you want to sanity-check what your build should cost, our website cost calculator gives you a range in about a minute.

When Next.js is genuinely the right call

When the site is actually software.

Reach for Next.js when you have user accounts and content that changes per person, a dashboard or portal behind a login, a search or configurator complex enough to need real state management, an ecommerce experience with live inventory and personalised pricing, or an existing React codebase and team where a second framework is the expensive option rather than the cheap one.

Notice what is not on that list. A blog. A services page. A case study library. Those are content, and content is Astro’s home ground.

There is also a legitimate middle path. Nothing stops you running a fast Astro marketing site alongside a Next.js application on a subdomain. Marketing gets a site it can move quickly on, engineering gets the framework the product needs, and neither is compromising for the other. We cover the specifics of each on our Astro and Next.js build pages.

So which should you choose?

If you are choosing a stack for a site whose job is to explain what you do and generate enquiries, choose Astro. It is faster by default, cheaper to build and run, and harder to accidentally break in ways that hurt search and AI visibility.

Choose Next.js when the site is a product, or when your team’s existing React expertise makes anything else a false economy.

The mistake worth avoiding is choosing the heavier option because it feels more serious. A marketing site is judged on how fast it loads, whether AI can read it and whether it turns visitors into conversations. On all three, the lighter stack starts ahead.