1/ Themes are first-class, not an afterthought. In WordPress, themes are fragile. Change one line and you break child themes or lose customizations. In Astero, switch themes in one click. Your content, SEO, URLs, and media stay intact. No rebuild. No redeploy.
2/ Live visual editing, not code fiddling. WordPress: settings are scattered across theme customizer, admin panels, and theme files. Astero: one live editor. Change colors, fonts, layout, header, footer see it live in real-time. Non-developers can brand a site in 10 minutes.
3/ No plugin sprawl. WordPress sites end up with 20+ plugins (SEO, forms, caching, security, backups, analytics, analytics, more analytics). Each one is a dependency. Each one is a security surface. Astero ships SEO, forms, redirects, cache control, audit logs, 2FA, cookie consent built in. One product. One vendor.
4/ SEO is native, not bolted on. WordPress needs Yoast or Rank Math. Astero: titles, meta, Open Graph, Twitter cards, structured data, XML sitemap, robots.txt, 301/302 redirects, llms.txt all in one control panel. All auto-maintained.
Hi — I'm the other co-founder of Astero.
To build on Nikita's point: what pushed us to start this was the last 20% of website building. Most AI tools can produce a passable landing page, but as soon as you want to change padding or wire up a real form, you are back to fighting the tool.
So we built it the other way around. AI gets you to a working draft fast, and after that you get real visual editing and direct access to the code. No proprietary layout engine in between.
I'll be around today. Happy to go into the technical side or how the generated code is structured if anyone wants to ask.