Web Dev Tools

Astro

Content-first framework with islands of interactivity.

Astro 6 ships static-by-default sites that lazily hydrate "islands" of React / Svelte / Vue / Solid components. It's the dominant framework for documentation, blogs, marketing sites, and content-heavy products.

Components

  • Astro (its own component format .astro) plus optional renderers for React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, Preact, Lit
  • Content Collections — typed content with Zod schemas
  • Server Islands — defer dynamic parts of an otherwise-static page
  • Vite under the hood
  • Optional: Starlight for docs, DB for hosted SQLite, Studio for content editing
  • Deploys to Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Deno Deploy, Node, AWS, etc.

What it's good at

  • Zero JS by default — you ship interactivity only where you actually use it.
  • Best-in-class for documentation — Starlight (Astro's docs theme) is one of the top docs frameworks alongside Fumadocs, Nextra, VitePress, and Mintlify.
  • Multi-framework — add a React component to a Vue-heavy site, or vice versa, no friction.
  • Content typing — Zod-backed frontmatter validation is a real productivity boost.

What you give up

  • It's not the right tool for app-heavy products (dashboards, editors, multi-step flows). Use a regular SPA framework for those.
  • Server-side state and request-scoped data are less ergonomic than in Next.js or Remix.

When to pick

  • A docs site, blog, marketing site, or content product.
  • A site where 90% is static and 10% needs to be interactive.
  • You want to migrate off WordPress without going to a heavy JS framework.

When to skip

  • You're building a real-time app, dashboard, editor, or anything with heavy logged-in state.

Worth knowing

This very docs site could equally be built with Astro Starlight. We chose Fumadocs because it's React-based and matches the user's stack, but Starlight is the more popular choice for pure-content docs in 2026.

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