Dagster vs Kestra
On the evidence we track, Dagster leads this comparison with a composite score of 70/100. Scores are only directly comparable because these tools share a category; the full breakdown and every source is below.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for data engineering tools. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Dagster
LeaderAn orchestration and observability platform that models data assets, manages their dependencies, and integrates lineage tracking, quality monitoring, and data cataloging for managing pipelines from development to production.
Kestra
A language-agnostic platform that lets teams define and run business-critical workflows declaratively as code, with built-in scheduling, event-driven triggers, retries, failure handling, and full observability across cloud, on-premise, and air-gapped deployments.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Dagster
LeaderFrom $10/month. Free 30-day trial. Subscription plus metered usage model.
- Solo$10/month + $0.04/credit + $0.01/minute serverless compute
- Core and asset-based orchestration
- Local development (dg CLI)
- Partitions and backfills
- Branch deployments
- Asset checks
- +3 more
- Starter$100/month + $0.035/credit
- All Solo features
- Workflow-based orchestration
- Freshness policies
- Data column lineage
- BI tool integration
- +5 more
- ProContact sales
- All Starter features
- Custom serverless compute
- Cost tracking and insights
- Personalized onboarding support
- Private Slack channel
- +8 more
Kestra
- Open SourceFree
- Kestra CloudManaged cloud with enterprise support
- Fully Managed Platform (Hosting, Upgrades, Monitoring)
- Built-in Security and Governance Features
- Customer Success Program & Enterprise Support with SLA
- Audit Logs
- Kestra EnterpriseContact sales
- Run anywhere Cloud, On-Prem, Air-Gapped
- RBAC, audit logs, secrets management, asset lineage
- AI Copilot (Any LLM Cloud or Self-Hosted)
- Human-in-the-Loop Approvals
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
- dbt
- Spark
- Azure
- AWS
- Airbyte
- Slack
- PagerDuty
- Datadog
- Python
- Salesforce
- AWS Secrets Manager
Dagster
Leader- Snowflake
- Databricks
- Tableau
- Soda
- Microsoft Teams
- dbt Cloud
- Fivetran
- AWS S3
- AWS Redshift
- AWS EMR
- AWS Glue
- AWS Athena
- AWS CloudWatch
- Looker
- Power BI
- Sigma
- Clickhouse
- Ray
- lakeFS
- OpenMetadata
- Cube
- SFTP
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Slurm
- +4 more
Kestra
- Ansible
- Dremio
- Arrow Flight SQL
- Git
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Terraform
- S3
- Azure Data Lake Storage
- Postgres
- JDBC databases
- HTTP APIs
- Polars
- Bash
- Node.js
- Go
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Spark
- PostgreSQL
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Google Gemini
- +23 more
Dagster or Kestra: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.