Wire vs Asteroid: a network layer you get on day one, or one you have to discover

Wire and Asteroid are converging on the same idea from opposite directions. Both now agree that the network layer, the raw API calls a portal's own frontend makes, is the right place to run agent workflows, not a browser rendering a DOM. Where they differ is how you get there, and whether that network layer is guaranteed before you ever run a job.

Wire ships a pre-built, centrally maintained catalog of 910 sites and 4,937 actions. Every one of them runs at the network layer from the first call. Asteroid starts every new portal at a browser-driven, LLM-reasoning tier, and only reaches network-layer replay if a workflow earns its way there, on a per-customer basis, and only where the portal allows it.

What Asteroid does well

Asteroid's Astro is a genuinely strong agent builder. You describe a workflow in plain language and Astro assembles a graph-based agent, nodes and transitions, that a non-technical operator can review and publish without writing code. That's a real advantage over an API-first tool like Wire, where you're calling a catalog rather than building something bespoke.

Asteroid also reaches further than Wire on raw environment coverage. It runs Browser, Linux, Windows, and Citrix environments, so it can automate desktop software and virtualized apps that have no web frontend to reverse-engineer at all. Wire has no answer for that. And Asteroid has repositioned hard into healthcare specifically: the homepage now reads "One connector for EHRs, payer portals, registries, and desktop apps that will never ship a good API," backed by production numbers like 37,000 records processed monthly across 11 EHRs for one customer and 200,000-plus enrollment workflows for another. (Asteroid, 2026)

If you're a YC founder, Asteroid is free for your first 12 months. (Y Combinator company page) That's a real distribution edge into exactly the kind of early-stage team that would otherwise be evaluating Wire.

How Asteroid actually executes a workflow

This is the part worth being precise about, because Asteroid's own homepage lays out three distinct execution tiers, and the differences matter for anyone comparing cost and latency.

Agentic. The first time an agent hits a new portal, a frontier model drives the browser directly: reads the screen, reasons about what it sees, and acts, the way a person would. Zero setup, works on any portal. This is also the slowest and most expensive tier, because every step burns an LLM call.

Scripted. After enough agentic runs, the agent writes its own deterministic script from what it learned. Asteroid's own claim is 10x fewer LLM calls once a workflow is scripted, since deterministic steps replay without the model and the LLM only handles judgment calls. This is where most production volume is supposed to live. (Asteroid, 2026)

Reverse-engineered API. Astro watches how the portal talks to its own backend, finds the underlying private API, and calls it directly. In Asteroid's own words: "Browser work becomes a data call." This is the same idea Wire is built on entirely. Asteroid is explicit that this tier is "the ceiling, where the portal allows it," not a guarantee. Their own production stat: a task that took roughly an hour on the agentic tier drops to 3 to 4 minutes once the API path is discovered. (Asteroid, 2026)

That last number is the detail worth sitting with. Even at Asteroid's best-case tier, discovered specifically for that customer's specific portal, they're citing minutes. Wire's own live status page puts system-wide latency under 312ms at the 99th percentile (anakin.io/products/wire), for every one of 910 catalogued sites, on the first call, for every customer.

How Wire's catalog works instead

Wire doesn't discover a network-layer path per customer. Anakin builds and maintains it centrally, once, and every customer who calls that action gets the same guaranteed network-layer execution from the start.

curl -X POST https://api.openwire.sh/v1/wire/task \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "action_id": "amazon.search_products",
    "params": { "query": "wireless keyboard" }
  }'

# Response (202 Accepted)
{
  "status": "processing",
  "job_id": "3f8aa45d-6ea3-4107-88ce-7f39ecf48a84",
  "poll_url": "/v1/wire/jobs/3f8aa45d-6ea3-4107-88ce-7f39ecf48a84"
}

Poll for the result and it comes back as structured JSON, no rendered DOM, no screenshot, no LLM in the runtime path at all:

curl https://api.openwire.sh/v1/wire/jobs/3f8aa45d-6ea3-4107-88ce-7f39ecf48a84 \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY"

# Response
{
  "status": "completed",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "duration_ms": 640,
  "result": {
    "status": "completed",
    "data": {
      "products": [
        { "title": "Logitech MX Keys", "price": 99.99, "rating": 4.7 }
      ]
    }
  }
}

There's no agentic warm-up period and no per-customer discovery step, because the discovery already happened when Anakin built the action. If the target site changes its layout, Wire's actions are built to self-heal: the system detects the break and repairs the integration automatically in most cases, with an engineer stepping in only when the automated fix can't resolve it on its own. The action_id your agent calls doesn't change.

The catalog itself keeps growing. It's added roughly 100 sites in the last seven weeks alone, and any site can be requested directly through the catalog page, with most new actions shipping within days. Under the hood, a request calls POST /v1/wire/build-request: Wire generates a scraper from your description, auto-tests it against the live site, and publishes it to the catalog on success. It's asynchronous, and credits are charged on submission and refunded automatically if the build fails. One correction worth making plainly: a build request defaults to visibility: "private", visible only to your account, not automatically shared with every Wire customer. You can set it to "public" to contribute it to the shared catalog, but that's an explicit choice, not the default. The 910-site catalog everyone sees today is the shared, public set; a build you request through the API doesn't join that set automatically.

What happens on a portal neither one has touched yet

This is the honest edge case, and it doesn't unambiguously favor Wire. If you point either tool at a portal that's completely new to them, Asteroid's Agentic tier gets you a working result today, no catalog entry required, no build request, no waiting. It's slow and it's LLM-token-expensive, but it runs now.

Wire's answer for an uncatalogued site is the build request above: automated and auto-tested, but not instant, and there's no published SLA for how long a build takes. For anything that only needs to be read, not acted on, Anakin has a faster answer that isn't Wire at all: URL Scraper hits any URL directly, no catalog entry needed, with an optional headless-browser mode for JS-heavy pages and a synchronous endpoint (POST /v1/url-scraper/scrape) that returns inline with no polling. For a one-off scrape of a page neither tool has catalogued, that's faster than a build request and doesn't touch an LLM at all. What it doesn't do is act: fill in a form, click through a multi-step flow, or complete a transaction, the way an Agentic-tier Asteroid agent or a Wire catalog action can. For read-only tasks, Anakin closes most of this gap without needing Wire specifically. For anything that requires acting on the portal, Asteroid's zero-setup Agentic tier remains the faster path to a first result, and Wire's build request is the path to a fast, repeatable, catalog-backed one.

Identity and credentials: a named vault vs pooled profiles

Wire's identity model, per Anakin's own API docs, stores each login as a named identity holding one of several credential types (a browser session, raw credentials, an API key, or a token), AES-256 encrypted at rest and injected at runtime, never returned by the API. Wire also has native 1Password integration: POST /v1/wire/login can find-or-create an identity and sign in using a connected 1Password vault in a single call, and a separate endpoint re-verifies or refreshes that login later.

Asteroid's documented identity system goes further in a couple of specific ways. It supports profile pools, multiple credentials for a role with selection strategies and concurrency limits, built specifically to avoid rate-limiting an account under high-volume automation. It also has native TOTP support for two-factor logins, and a dedicated inbox per profile (agentmail.asteroid.ai) built to receive and act on email-based 2FA codes without a human in the loop.

Worth flagging plainly: whether Wire has an equivalent to pooled, rotating identities for concurrency management isn't confirmed in the docs, and neither is whether Wire's task execution can clear a live 2FA challenge on its own without a 1Password vault backing the identity (1Password can autofill TOTP codes for saved logins, which may functionally close part of this gap, but that's inference, not something documented). If your workflow needs to run many concurrent sessions against the same platform without tripping rate limits, or needs to clear 2FA on accounts that aren't already in a 1Password vault, Asteroid's identity system is more explicitly built for that today.

Data format: a maintained schema vs whatever that build produced

Every Wire catalog action has a documented parameter schema and response schema, discoverable through GET /v1/wire/catalog/{slug} before you ever call it. That schema is written once, tested by Anakin, and identical for every customer who calls that action. Two different Wire customers automating the same Amazon action get identically shaped output.

Asteroid doesn't have a shared schema catalog in the same sense, because workflows are built per customer through Astro rather than published centrally. Output shape depends on how that specific agent was built and what its Output nodes were configured to return. Two different Asteroid customers automating the same portal could reasonably end up with differently structured output, since neither one is drawing from a shared, tested definition. For anyone building a pipeline that expects consistent field names and types over time, that's a real, structural difference, not just a style preference.

Cost: metered runtime plus LLM markup vs a flat credit

Asteroid's pricing is metered, not flat. The rate card: browser runtime at $0.12 an hour, Linux at $0.07, Windows at $0.50, a $0.01 session-start fee, and LLM usage billed separately at 1.2x market rate. (Asteroid pricing, 2026) That last line is the one to watch. On the Agentic tier, where every step is an LLM call, token cost is likely the majority of the bill, not the runtime meter. The Startup plan is $300 a month for 25 concurrent environments with a 10% bonus credit; Scale is $1,000 a month for 100 concurrent environments with a 15% bonus. Both include HIPAA/BAA.

Wire charges a flat credit per successful outcome. No compute-time meter, no separate LLM line item, because there's no LLM in the execution path to bill for. You know the cost of an action before you call it.

Wire vs Asteroid at a glance

When Asteroid is the better fit

If your workflow lives on a desktop app, a Citrix-virtualized system, or you need to act on a portal neither tool has touched, fill a form, click through a flow, complete a transaction, Asteroid's Agentic tier works today with zero setup. If your automation needs to run many concurrent sessions against the same platform without tripping rate limits, or has to clear 2FA on accounts outside a 1Password vault, Asteroid's profile pools and native TOTP support are more explicitly built for that today. If you're a YC founder, the free year makes the decision easy regardless of the technical comparison. And if you want a no-code builder your ops team can operate directly, Astro is a real strength.

When Wire is the better fit

If the platform you need is already in Wire's catalog, you get network-layer execution, latency under 312ms at the 99th percentile, and flat pricing on the first call, not after a discovery period, not conditional on "where the portal allows it." For teams running high volumes of calls against known platforms like Amazon, GitHub, or Reddit, that removes both the ramp-up cost of the Agentic tier and the ongoing LLM token bill that comes with it. You also get a documented, shared output schema instead of whatever shape that specific build happened to produce. And if the site isn't catalogued but you only need to read it, not act on it, Anakin's URL Scraper covers that immediately without waiting on either a Wire build or an Asteroid agent, one of eight products under the same Anakin API key, alongside Crawl, Map, Browser API, Browser Sessions, Agentic Search, and Search API.

Get started with Wire and see if your platform is already in the catalog.