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 973 sites and 5,279 actions as of 25 October 2026. 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 once its agent has discovered that portal's private API, and only where the portal allows it.

Where Asteroid's approach differs

Astro, Asteroid's agent builder, lets you describe a workflow in plain language and assembles a graph-based agent, nodes and transitions, that a non-technical operator can review and publish without writing code. On its Scale and Enterprise plans, Asteroid also offers a workflow catalog of pre-built templates that each customer deploys and customizes. Wire's catalog is API-first: you call a pre-built action rather than building or customizing a workflow.

Asteroid's environment coverage extends beyond the web: it runs Browser, Linux, Windows, and Citrix environments, so it can automate desktop software and virtualized apps with no web frontend to work from. Wire operates at the network layer of web-facing sites specifically. Asteroid has also positioned squarely on healthcare: its homepage offers "an API for EHRs, payer portals and desktop apps in minutes, even those with no API," says it has automated more than 100 healthcare portals, and cites production numbers of 37,000 records a month across 11 EHRs for one customer and 200,000-plus enrollment runs for another. (Asteroid, 2026)

How Asteroid actually executes a workflow

Asteroid's homepage lays out three distinct execution tiers, and the differences between them drive both 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)

Generated API. Astro watches how the portal talks to its own servers, 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 portal 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 needs context. The 3 to 4 minutes covers a whole portal task, and Asteroid's pricing calculator puts a single generated API call at a few seconds, so at its ceiling Asteroid runs in roughly the same range as a Wire job. Anakin's docs give 3 to 30 seconds as typical completion for a Wire job, and the Amazon search below finished in about 3.3 seconds on a run on 25 October 2026. The real gap is when you get that speed: Wire is at that tier for every one of its 973 catalogued sites on the first call, for every customer, while Asteroid reaches it portal by portal, after discovery, where the portal allows it.

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. The request below uses the Execute Task endpoint; read-only actions like this one can also run with no API key at all through Zero Touch.

curl -X POST https://api.anakin.io/v1/wire/task \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "action_id": "am_search_products",
    "params": { "query": "wireless keyboard", "limit": 3 }
  }'

# 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, with no rendered DOM, no screenshot and no LLM in the runtime path. This is a real response from a run on 25 October 2026:

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

# Response (a real run on 25 Oct 2026, trimmed to 2 of 3 products)
{
  "status": "completed",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "execution_ms": 3318,
  "data": {
    "status": "ok",
    "data": {
      "query": "wireless keyboard",
      "returned": 3,
      "products": [
        { "asin": "B079JLY5M5", "title": "Logitech MK270 Full Size Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo - Black", "price": 19.99, "rating": 4.5, "review_count": 111401 },
        { "asin": "B004N627KS", "title": "Logitech K270 Full Size Wireless Keyboard for Windows - Black", "price": 22.45, "rating": 4.3, "review_count": 10175 }
      ]
    }
  }
}

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, up from 910 sites when this comparison first ran in July to 973 in late October, and any site can be requested directly through the catalog page. Under the hood, a request calls POST /v1/wire/build-request (the Build Request reference has the details): 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. Note that 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 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 edge case does not clearly 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. Anakin's Browser API can act on that portal today if your team writes the Playwright or Puppeteer steps itself: it is a managed stealth browser in the cloud, billed at 1 credit per 2 minutes, with saved sessions for logins. What it does not do is work out those steps with an LLM. 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 reads credentials straight from a vault you own, with 1Password and Azure Key Vault as native identity sources: POST /v1/wire/login can find-or-create an identity and sign in from that 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 (profile groups in its dashboard), 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} (see the Catalog Details reference) 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 publish one shared action per portal in the same sense. Self-serve workflows are built per customer through Astro, and its workflow catalog offers templates that each customer deploys and customizes. Output shape depends on how that specific agent or customized template was configured to return it. Two different Asteroid customers automating the same portal could reasonably end up with differently structured output, since each one configures its own definition. For a pipeline that expects consistent field names and types over time, that is a structural difference.

Cost: metered runtime plus LLM markup vs a fixed credit per action

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, proxy traffic at $8 per GB, 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 fixed credit cost per action, listed in the catalog, and credits for a failed job are refunded automatically. The Amazon search above costs 1 credit. There is no compute-time meter and 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.

Startups can cut that further. Anakin's Jumpstart program covers any startup backed by a school, accelerator, incubator, or VC, with under $50M raised and fewer than 100 people: a one-time grant of up to 400,000 pages on the Scale plan that never expires, plus 50% off Pro or Scale for six months.

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 want a no-code builder your ops team can operate directly, Astro is a real strength, and on Enterprise Asteroid will build and maintain the workflows for you.

When Wire is the better fit

If the platform you need is already in Wire's catalog, you get network-layer execution, jobs that typically finish in seconds, and a fixed per-action price 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 11 Anakin products, alongside Crawl, Map, Browser API, Browser Sessions, Agentic Search, Search API, Website Monitoring, AI Visibility and Zero Touch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between Wire and Asteroid?

Both run workflows at the network layer, the API calls a portal's own frontend makes. Wire ships that layer pre-built: a maintained catalog of 973 sites and 5,279 actions as of 25 October 2026, each callable from the first request. Asteroid starts a new portal on an agentic, LLM-driven tier, moves to scripts, and reaches a generated API only once it has discovered the portal's private API, where the portal allows it.

How does Asteroid pricing work?

Asteroid meters usage: browser runtime at $0.12 an hour, Linux at $0.07, Windows at $0.50, a $0.01 session-start fee, proxy traffic at $8 per GB, and LLM usage at 1.2x market rate. The Startup plan is $300 a month with 25 concurrent environments and Scale is $1,000 a month with 100, per the Asteroid pricing page.

How much does a Wire action cost?

Each Wire action has a fixed credit cost listed in the catalog, and credits for a failed job are refunded automatically. The Amazon search shown above costs 1 credit.

Can Asteroid automate desktop and Citrix apps?

Yes. Asteroid runs Browser, Linux, Windows and Citrix environments, so it can automate desktop software with no web frontend. Wire works at the network layer of web-facing sites only.

What if a site is not in Wire's catalog yet?

Submit a build request: Wire generates the action from your description, auto-tests it against the live site and publishes it on success, private to your account by default. For read-only needs, Anakin's URL Scraper works on any URL now, and Browser API lets your own Playwright or Puppeteer script act on a portal.

How do Wire and Asteroid handle logins and 2FA?

Wire stores each login as a named identity, AES-256 encrypted at rest, injected at runtime and never returned by the API, and it can sign in from a vault you own, 1Password or Azure Key Vault. Asteroid offers profile pools for rotating several accounts, native TOTP support, and a per-profile email inbox for email-based 2FA codes.

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