Why is Astro better than Gatsby?

Pages ship zero JavaScript by default and only components you mark as islands hydrate. A Gatsby site is a React single-page app. Content collections give Markdown and MDX type-safe frontmatter, loaded with ESM imports and getCollection() instead of Gatsby's GraphQL data layer. It is UI-agnostic, so React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, Solid and web components all work, even on the same page. Astro is where the activity is. npm counted 32,705,642 downloads of astro in the month to early November 2026, against 968,518 for gatsby. Astro stays MIT-licensed, and Cloudflare, which hired the whole Astro team, has committed to open governance and deployment to any platform.

Instead of Gatsby: Astro

Use Astro instead of Gatsby. It sends no JavaScript to the browser by default, renders on the server or at build time, and still lets you use React components as interactive islands. Gatsby has faded since Netlify bought it in 2023, while Astro's team now works at Cloudflare.

Old Gatsby ★ 56k MIT JavaScript Pushed 16 days ago gatsbyjs.com

Instead Astro ★ 64k See repository TypeScript Pushed today astro.build

Both are for building content-driven websites such as blogs, docs and marketing sites.

Why Astro is better

Pages ship zero JavaScript by default and only components you mark as islands hydrate. A Gatsby site is a React single-page app.
Content collections give Markdown and MDX type-safe frontmatter, loaded with ESM imports and getCollection() instead of Gatsby's GraphQL data layer.
It is UI-agnostic, so React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, Solid and web components all work, even on the same page.
Astro is where the activity is. npm counted 32,705,642 downloads of astro in the month to early November 2026, against 968,518 for gatsby.
Astro stays MIT-licensed, and Cloudflare, which hired the whole Astro team, has committed to open governance and deployment to any platform.

When to keep Gatsby

Keep Gatsby only for a working site you do not plan to change much, or one built around specific Gatsby source plugins and its GraphQL layer. It still has a large plugin catalogue of over 2500 plugins, but new projects should not start on it.

Switching

It is a rebuild, but a familiar one. Astro component syntax is close to JSX, React components can be reused through the official React integration, and Markdown and MDX content carries over. The main work is replacing GraphQL page queries with imports or content collections and rewriting page templates as Astro components. There is an official migration guide from Gatsby in the Astro docs.

Watch out

Astro is built for content sites; an app with lots of client-side state fits a React framework better. Gatsby plugins do not carry over, so image, sitemap and CMS source plugins need Astro equivalents. Cloudflare now employs the core team, so the project's direction depends on that company keeping its open-source commitments.

More newer, better web frameworks

Sources

Judged on 2026-11-06. See every web frameworks, or all 66 replacements.