When to use Astro and when not: my experience

#webdev #astrojs #nuxt

🚀 Astro: great for blogs, portfolios, SEO, and low-budget projects.

🛠️ Nuxt.js: best for applications with business logic, roles, authentication, and state management.

Recently, I had the experience of launching my personal website using Astro.js, a very simple technology to quickly create a blog or portfolio. What surprised me the most was how easy it is to integrate technologies like Vue.js, React.js, and even other modern frontend libraries.

With that motivation, I decided to launch alejandrotorres.dev, a simple site to showcase my experience, skills, and portfolio. In just three days, I had the first version in production.

I was impressed to see that Astro can integrate with technologies like:

Vue.js
React.js

And many more. For my needs, it was great to know it worked with the two technologies I master.

The good things about Astro

Speed: it definitely delivers what it promises. The result is fast, lightweight static pages, and you can even make use of server-side endpoints, giving you a small margin to add logic without leaving Astro’s philosophy.
Deployment: I should highlight how easy it was to deploy on Cloudflare Pages (I almost always use this platform). But it also works with many other tools.
Content: the main reason I chose Astro, and it fully delivers. Astro was designed to present your content, and it does it beautifully. Its content collections allow you to work with .md or .json files, greatly simplifying the creation of blogs, documentation, or landing pages.

The not-so-good

Compatibility with other frameworks: while you can use Vue.js or React.js, sometimes it’s a bit messy to pass props or decide when to use client:load or client:idle to avoid hydration issues. Especially if you’re coming from an SPA framework where this feels more natural.
Documentation: often I had to dig into the framework itself to solve issues or debug, especially when I decided to use TypeScript.
State management: this is a weak spot. If you think you can have the best of both worlds, that’s not the case. Astro is deficient at managing state, and implementing client-side state can be a real challenge. If you need global state or complex client-side interactions, it feels limited.

When to use Astro

Blogs: an incredible tool for content creation. You can write in .md or .json files, making the process of designing and publishing content much simpler (see docs).
Portfolios: usually static by nature, making Astro a perfect fit since it’s content-driven.
SEO: static pages allow you to easily add the necessary tags to optimize your site for search engines.
Headless CMS Integration: Astro supports a wide variety of CMS integrations for blogs, news, or dynamic content.
Low budget projects: you don’t need a fortune to run a solid site with Astro, making it a great option for MVPs or proof-of-concepts.

When not to use Astro

Astro may complicate things if you need:

Global state management.
Authentication in protected routes.
Highly dynamic components that depend on client-side rendering.

In those cases, I recommend moving to a more complete framework like Nuxt.js.

With Nuxt you get:

✅ SSR + SSG + SPA in the same project.
✅ Middlewares for user roles and authentication (server-side & client-side).
✅ Secure API communication (no secrets exposed).
✅ A stronger ecosystem for projects with complex business logic.

Conclusion

My experience is clear:

Astro is amazing for content-oriented sites (portfolios, blogs, documentation, landing pages).
Nuxt is more suitable when building complete web applications with roles, authentication, and complex state.

It’s not about which is “better,” but about which one is best for each scenario.

For me, Astro was perfect for my portfolio, but if I had to build a payment portal or a corporate dashboard, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose Nuxt.js.

🙏 Thanks for reading. If this helped even one person, it was worth writing.

👉 Have you tried Astro or Nuxt? Which one would you choose for your next project?

DEV Community