Prefect Bought Dagster. Airflow Still Has More Stars Than Both Combined.
Prefect acquired Dagster this week. Combined GitHub stars and PyPI downloads for both still trail Apache Airflow alone. Here's what the deal actually changes.
5 articles exploring orchestration
Prefect acquired Dagster this week. Combined GitHub stars and PyPI downloads for both still trail Apache Airflow alone. Here's what the deal actually changes.
Comprehensive Apache Airflow analysis: open source and every managed vendor (Astronomer, Cloud Composer, MWAA), pricing at three scales, Airflow 3.0 migration, operational pain points, AI workflows, and a decision matrix for choosing the right deployment.
Comprehensive Dagster analysis: pricing, asset-centric orchestration, AI/ML pipelines, learning curve, integrations, and why treating data as the product gives teams lineage and governance that task-centric orchestrators cannot match.
Comprehensive Prefect analysis: pricing, scaling, deployment architecture, integrations, learning curve, and why its dynamic Python-native control flow fits AI agent workflows better than static DAG orchestrators.
After running all three in production: 20-criteria breakdown of real migration costs, team overhead, backfill behaviour, and which orchestrator survives 500+ pipelines.