AskSoma vs VedAstro

A library and a companion are not the same product

VedAstro is a non-profit, fully open-source Vedic astrology engine. Its repository documents 596+ calculation methods and 47 selectable ayanamsas, it runs on Swiss Ephemeris, and it ships an API, an MCP server and a WordPress plugin. The premium tier is $1 a month — ₹79 in India — and the free tier allows five requests a minute. Those are not typos. It is, by a wide margin, the cheapest serious Jyotish computation available anywhere.

So the honest framing of this comparison is not "which is better". VedAstro built a calculation library. AskSoma built a companion. Ask VedAstro where your Saturn sits and it will tell you, to the arc-second, with your choice of 47 ayanamsas. Ask it what that means for the job offer you are weighing this month and you are on your own — that interpretation is left to whatever you point at the numbers.

When you should genuinely pick VedAstro over us

If you are a developer, pick VedAstro. If you want to self-host so no third party ever sees a birth chart, pick VedAstro — self-hosting is the strongest privacy position in this entire comparison set and we cannot match it. If you are building your own astrology product and need an engine underneath it, pick VedAstro; at $1/month it is cheaper than the electricity to run your own. If you want to audit the maths rather than trust a vendor's word about it, the source is right there, which is more than we offer.

We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. A reader who needs an API and buys a consumer subscription from us has been badly served, and will churn.

When the interpretation is the product

Most people do not want 596 calculation methods. They want to know why this year has felt like wading through wet sand, and whether it lifts. That gap — between a correct number and an answer you can act on — is the whole of what AskSoma builds. Same Swiss Ephemeris underneath, same Lahiri sidereal maths; the difference is that the Dasha timeline arrives already read, in a conversation that remembers what you asked last week.

It is also worth being concrete about what "AI astrologer" means on each side. VedAstro's AstrologerChat is open source, which means its quality depends on the model you point it at. Ours is a fixed pipeline: a deterministic engine computes the timing windows, the dignities and the yogas, and the language model narrates what the engine produced. It cannot invent a date, because it is not the thing choosing the dates.

Forty-seven ayanamsas is a feature and a trap

VedAstro lets you choose from 47 ayanamsas — the correction between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs, which is the single number that decides whether your Sun lands in Sagittarius or Capricorn. Offering all of them is intellectually honest: the value is genuinely disputed, and a research tool should not hide that.

It is also a trap for a general reader, because the choice is not cosmetic. Lahiri and Raman differ by roughly a degree, which is enough to move a planet across a sign boundary in a chart where it sits near the cusp — and that changes the reading. A user who does not know which to pick will pick the default, get an answer, and never learn that a different equally-defensible setting would have said something else.

AskSoma takes the opposite approach and commits: Lahiri sidereal, stated on the methodology page, the same for every chart. That is a narrower tool. The trade is that two AskSoma readings are always comparable to each other, and when we are wrong we cannot retreat behind "you had the wrong ayanamsa selected". Pick whichever trade suits you — but pick it knowingly.

What auditability actually gets you

"Open source" is often invoked as a synonym for trustworthy. What it concretely gets you here is the ability to check the maths: you can read VedAstro's implementation of a Vimshottari Dasha and confirm it matches the classical rule, rather than taking a vendor's word. For anyone doing research, or building on top, that is decisive, and we will not pretend a closed product matches it.

What it does not settle is interpretation. Two systems can compute an identical Dasha timeline and say completely different things about what it means, and no amount of source access adjudicates between them — that is a question about Jyotish, not about code. This is why our own transparency effort points somewhere else: not at the source, but at the record. We publish what was predicted and whether it landed, because for interpretation that is the only check that means anything.

A blunt buyer’s guide

Choose VedAstro if you write code, want to self-host, need an API, care about auditing the calculations, or simply want the cheapest correct ephemeris available. Choose AskSoma if you want a chart you did not have to interpret yourself, spoken conversation, timing windows already read into plain language, and a record of accuracy over time. Many people should honestly use both — the engine for numbers, the companion for meaning.