What is astro-bento-portfolio, and is it free?

What "bento-like" means for this template

A bento grid lays content out as a set of boxes of different sizes on one screen, the way a bento box holds several small compartments — a pattern that spread through portfolio sites because it lets someone show name, links, socials and a short bio at a glance instead of behind navigation. The catalog's own description of this template calls it "bento-like (almost)", which is worth repeating rather than smoothing over: it is a single-page layout in that spirit, not a claim to a strict, named grid system.

That single-page scope is the whole design. There's no About page, no separate Projects page, no blog — everything lives on one screen, which suits someone who wants a link-in-bio-style presence more than a portfolio with individual case studies for each project. If you need dedicated pages to write up projects in depth, this is the wrong template to start from.

Setting it up

The catalog entry documents the setup directly: you update src/site-config.ts with your name, links, email, and location or timezone, set SITE_URL in a .env file, and restart the dev server. That's the entire configuration surface described — no page templates to duplicate, no routing to configure, because there's only the one page.

Anything beyond that — changing colours, fonts, or adding a section the config file doesn't expose — isn't documented in the catalog entry, so treat it as reading the source rather than following a guide. For a single-file config template like this one, that's usually a short read, but it's worth knowing going in rather than assuming a settings panel exists.

Deployment isn't specific to this template rather than to Astro itself: like any Astro project, it builds to static output, which means it deploys to any static host or platform that serves plain files — nothing about a one-page bento layout changes that part of the workflow.

What's in the catalog entry

The tags on this entry are astrojs, astrojs-blog, astrojs-template, personal-website, portfolio and portfolio-template. The astrojs-blog tag is worth flagging rather than ignoring: the description centres entirely on a single static page, with no blog section mentioned, so it isn't clear from the catalog alone whether blogging is an optional extra or a leftover tag from the project's template family. Check the repository itself before assuming either way.

On maintenance: the template carries an MIT licence, 374 GitHub stars, and its last recorded commit was 2026-08-09 — a few weeks before this was written, which is a reasonable recency signal for a personal-project-scale template, without pretending to know its longer-term update cadence.

How it compares to the catalog's other Astro portfolio and landing templates

astro-portfolio is the more traditional alternative: built with Astro, React, TypeScript and Tailwind, designed in Figma, and — unlike the bento template — it ships a working contact form through Formspree. It has 249 GitHub stars. If a single bento screen feels too thin and you want distinct sections plus a way for people to actually message you, this is the closer fit.

astro-antfustyle-theme goes further in the other direction: a broader developer-and-creator theme with a gallery, Giscus-powered comments, and markdown content support, at 266 GitHub stars. It's built for someone who wants an ongoing content site — posts, a gallery — rather than a static card of links.

And if the goal isn't a personal portfolio at all but a small product or freelance marketing site, AstroWind is the catalog's general-purpose option: a widely-starred Astro and Tailwind template with a full marketing component set — hero, features, pricing, testimonials, blog — that a one-page bento layout was never trying to be.

Where it falls short

The single-page design is also its limitation. There's no content management, no markdown-driven blog documented, and no contact form built in — if your portfolio needs to grow past a screen of links (write-ups per project, a changelog, a contact flow), you'll be editing the page's own components directly rather than adding new files in a predictable pattern, or you'll outgrow the template and want astro-portfolio or a fuller Astro theme instead.

It's also a small, single-maintainer project rather than a widely-adopted framework starter — useful to know if you're weighing long-term support against how quickly you can be live with something simple today.

astro-bento-portfolio is one of thirteen Astro-tagged boilerplates in the catalog, spanning blogs, marketing sites and portfolios alongside this one; the full set, with the same stars-and-licence detail for each, is browsable on the Astro stack page.

Frequently asked