# Dagster vs Kestra

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Dagster

| Attribute | Dagster | Kestra |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 70 (68% (medium)) | 59 (54% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 286 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 16,269 | - |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | 2,028,283 | - |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"A unified orchestration and observability platform that manages data pipelines through assets, tracks dependencies and lineage, enforces data quality, and integrates with existing tools like dbt, Snowflake, and Spark. Supports both self-hosted open-source and managed cloud deployment. It is indexed under Data Engineering Tools.","source":"https://dagster.io/pricing","question":"What is Dagster?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Dagster offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Paid plans start at $0.01. Prices are published openly on the vendor's own pricing page. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://dagster.io/pricing","question":"Is Dagster free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Dagster supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://dagster.io/pricing","question":"What platforms does Dagster support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Dagster can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://dagster.io/pricing","question":"Can Dagster be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 14 integrations for Dagster, including dbt, Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Azure, AWS, Airbyte and Tableau, plus 6 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://dagster.io/pricing","question":"What does Dagster integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR for Dagster. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Dagster not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://dagster.io/security","question":"What security certifications does Dagster have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Yes. Dagster is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster","question":"Is Dagster open source?","confidence":0.95},{"answer":"Dagster is available worldwide. Its primary market is the United States.","source":"https://dagster.io/pricing","question":"Where is Dagster available?","confidence":0.75}]` | `[{"answer":"An open-source platform designed for orchestrating complex, long-running workflows across data pipelines, AI systems, and infrastructure operations. Supports multiple languages and deployment models (cloud, self-hosted, air-gapped), with built-in reliability features like retries, backfills, and comprehensive observability. It is indexed under Data Engineering Tools.","source":"https://kestra.io/pricing","question":"What is Kestra?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Kestra offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Paid plans are also available: Open Source, Kestra Cloud and Kestra Enterprise. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://kestra.io/pricing","question":"Is Kestra free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Kestra supports the web, Linux and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://kestra.io/pricing","question":"What platforms does Kestra support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Kestra can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid, on-premise, air-gapped and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://kestra.io/pricing","question":"Can Kestra be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 40 integrations for Kestra, including Ansible, dbt, Spark, Airbyte, Dremio, Arrow Flight SQL, Git and Kubernetes, plus 32 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://kestra.io/pricing","question":"What does Kestra integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2 and GDPR for Kestra. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Kestra not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://kestra.io/docs/configuration/security-and-secrets","question":"What security certifications does Kestra have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Kestra is available worldwide. Its primary market is the United States.","source":"https://kestra.io/pricing","question":"Where is Kestra available?","confidence":0.5}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"on_prem":true,"air_gapped":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | An 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. | 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. |
| features.capabilities | `{"cdc":false,"role":"orchestrator","lineage":true,"paradigm":"batch","dbt_native":true,"data_quality":true,"elt_pushdown":false,"python_first":true,"managed_cloud":true,"connector_count":"28+","self_hosted_oss":true,"incremental_runs":true,"distributed_executor":true}` | `{"cdc":false,"role":"orchestrator","lineage":true,"paradigm":"both","iso_27001":false,"dbt_native":true,"data_quality":true,"elt_pushdown":true,"python_first":true,"soc2_type_ii":true,"managed_cloud":true,"connector_count":"1900+","self_hosted_oss":true,"incremental_runs":true,"distributed_executor":true,"builder_ui_architecture":"visual_node_canvas","custom_http_webhook_catch_and_triggering":true,"native_llm_nodes_anthropic_openai_gemini":true,"on_premise_self_hosted_deployment_option":true,"bring_your_own_key_byok_for_llm_inference":true,"web_scraping_and_browser_automation_nodes":false,"sub_workflow_calling_and_reusable_templates":true,"human_in_the_loop_approval_steps_via_slack_email":true,"dynamic_conditional_routing_via_llm_classification":true,"unstructured_document_extraction_pdf_image_to_json":true}` |
| integrations.count | 28 | 2,000 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"dbt"},{"name":"Snowflake"},{"name":"Spark"},{"name":"Databricks"},{"name":"Azure"},{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"Airbyte"},{"name":"Tableau"},{"name":"Soda"},{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"Datadog"},{"name":"Python"},{"name":"dbt Cloud","native":true,"category":"transformation","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Fivetran","native":true,"category":"ingestion","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"AWS S3","category":"storage","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"AWS Redshift","category":"data_warehouse"},{"name":"AWS EMR","category":"compute"},{"name":"AWS Glue","category":"transformation"},{"name":"AWS Athena","category":"analytics"},{"name":"AWS CloudWatch","category":"monitoring","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Salesforce","category":"crm","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Looker","category":"analytics"},{"name":"Power BI","category":"analytics"},{"name":"Sigma","category":"analytics"},{"name":"Clickhouse","category":"storage"},{"name":"Ray","category":"compute"},{"name":"lakeFS","category":"data_management"},{"name":"OpenMetadata","category":"metadata"},{"name":"Cube","category":"semantic_layer"},{"name":"SFTP","category":"file_transfer"},{"name":"Microsoft SharePoint","category":"collaboration"},{"name":"Slurm","category":"compute"},{"name":"AWS Secrets Manager","category":"security"},{"name":"AWS SSM Parameter Store","category":"configuration"},{"name":"AWS ECR","category":"container_registry"},{"name":"Airflow","native":true,"category":"orchestration","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Singer","native":true,"category":"ingestion","direction":"inbound"}]` | `[{"name":"Ansible"},{"name":"dbt"},{"name":"Spark"},{"name":"Airbyte"},{"name":"Dremio"},{"name":"Arrow Flight SQL"},{"name":"Git"},{"name":"GitHub"},{"name":"GitHub Actions"},{"name":"Kubernetes"},{"name":"Docker"},{"name":"Terraform"},{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"Azure Data Lake Storage"},{"name":"Postgres"},{"name":"JDBC databases"},{"name":"HTTP APIs"},{"name":"Polars"},{"name":"Python"},{"name":"Bash"},{"name":"Node.js"},{"name":"Go"},{"name":"Apache Kafka"},{"name":"Apache Spark"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"PostgreSQL"},{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Anthropic"},{"name":"Google Gemini"},{"name":"Perplexity"},{"name":"Google Analytics"},{"name":"Salesforce"},{"name":"Facebook Ads"},{"name":"RabbitMQ"},{"name":"Yahoo Finance"},{"name":"AWS Secrets Manager"},{"name":"HashiCorp Vault"},{"name":"Google Cloud"},{"name":"Google BigQuery"},{"name":"R"},{"name":"Java"},{"name":"Julia"},{"name":"Ruby"},{"name":"Shell"},{"name":"AWS","native":true,"category":"cloud","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Google Cloud Platform","native":true,"category":"cloud","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Azure","native":true,"category":"cloud","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Dataform","native":true,"category":"data_transformation","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Apache Tika","native":false,"category":"document_processing","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Gemini","native":true,"category":"ai_llm","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Azure Key Vault","native":true,"category":"secrets_management","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Google Secret Manager","native":true,"category":"secrets_management","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Kafka","native":true,"category":"streaming","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Elasticsearch","native":true},{"name":"Datadog","native":true},{"name":"Splunk","native":true},{"name":"MySQL","native":true}]` |
| language.primary | Python | - |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | - |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Solo","summary":"$10/month + $0.04/credit + $0.01/minute serverless compute","features":["Core and asset-based orchestration","Local development (dg CLI)","Partitions and backfills","Branch deployments","Asset checks","dbt integration","Asset lineage","Email and Slack alerts"],"minSeats":1,"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":10,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"credit"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.04,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"minute"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.01,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Personal projects and simple pipelines","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"users":"1","deployments":"1","code_locations":"1"}},{"free":false,"name":"Starter","summary":"$100/month + $0.035/credit","features":["All Solo features","Workflow-based orchestration","Freshness policies","Data column lineage","BI tool integration","Cost tracking for BigQuery and Snowflake","Catalog search","SAML SSO","Granular RBAC","PagerDuty and Datadog integration"],"minSeats":1,"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":100,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"credit"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.035,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Small teams running production pipelines","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"users":"up to 3","code_locations":"5"}},{"free":false,"name":"Pro","summary":"Custom pricing; contact sales","features":["All Starter features","Custom serverless compute","Cost tracking and insights","Personalized onboarding support","Private Slack channel","Uptime SLAs","Custom security questionnaires","AI proactive monitoring","SCIM provisioning (Okta, Entra ID)","Audit logs","Hybrid deployments (Kubernetes, ECS, Docker, Azure)","EU data residency","SIEM log export"],"description":"Building and scaling an enterprise data platform","contactSales":true,"includedLimits":{"deployments":"Unlimited","code_locations":"Unlimited"}}],"summary":"From $10/month. Free 30-day trial. Subscription plus metered usage model.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://dagster.io/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-10-13T15:14:18.877Z","freeTrialDays":30,"startingPrice":{"amount":10,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Open Source","summary":"Free, self-hosted","description":"Self-hosted open-source version","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Kestra Cloud","summary":"Managed cloud with enterprise support","features":["Fully Managed Platform (Hosting, Upgrades, Monitoring)","Built-in Security and Governance Features","Customer Success Program & Enterprise Support with SLA","Audit Logs"],"commitment":"annual","description":"Fully managed cloud platform","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Kestra Enterprise","summary":"Enterprise self-hosted with advanced governance","features":["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"],"commitment":"annual","description":"Self-hosted enterprise edition","contactSales":true}],"currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://kestra.io/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-09-06T16:17:51.489Z","billingPeriods":["year"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | freemium | freemium |
| pricing.price_level | low | low |
| pricing.starting_price | `{"amount":10,"currency":"USD"}` | - |
| pricing.transparent | yes | no |
| release.cadence_days | 7 | - |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.26","date":"2026-10-09T23:08:50Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.26"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.25","date":"2026-10-01T18:17:43Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.25"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.24","date":"2026-09-21T23:53:17Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.24"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.23","date":"2026-09-16T21:25:17Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.23"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.22","date":"2026-09-11T16:59:11Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.22"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.21","date":"2026-09-03T20:03:16Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.21"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.20","date":"2026-08-27T16:50:54Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.20"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.19","date":"2026-08-21T15:53:20Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.19"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.18","date":"2026-08-14T19:59:51Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.18"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.17","date":"2026-08-07T19:12:58Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.16","date":"2026-07-30T17:24:09Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.15","date":"2026-07-23T15:59:52Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.15"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.14","date":"2026-07-16T18:39:10Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.14"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.13","date":"2026-07-09T17:39:15Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.13"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.12","date":"2026-07-02T16:27:40Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.12"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.11","date":"2026-06-25T18:23:24Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.11"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.10","date":"2026-06-18T19:23:58Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.10"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.9","date":"2026-06-11T19:16:52Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.9"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.8","date":"2026-06-04T18:11:04Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.13.7","date":"2026-05-28T17:18:25Z","type":"stable","version":"1.13.7"}]` | - |
| security.certifications | `[{"name":"SOC 2 Type II","level":"Type II","status":"active"}]` | `[{"name":"SOC 2","status":"active"}]` |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.hipaa | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | 5.1 | - |
| security.soc2 | yes | yes |
| security.trust_center | https://dagster.io/security | https://kestra.io/docs/configuration/security-and-secrets |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":3,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=pypi&package_name=dagster&per_page=100","last_12m":1,"max_severity":"HIGH"}` | - |

## Capabilities (Data Engineering Tools)

| Capability | Dagster | Kestra |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Core** |  |  |
| Tool role | Orchestrator | Orchestrator |
| Processing paradigm | Batch | Batch + streaming |
| **Connectivity** |  |  |
| Connector count | 28+ | 1900+ |
| CDC / log-based replication | ✗ | ✗ |
| **Transformation** |  |  |
| In-warehouse transformation (push-down) | ✗ | ✓ |
| dbt-native orchestration | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Self-hosted / open-source available | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed cloud available | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Governance** |  |  |
| Data lineage / asset catalog | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Authoring** |  |  |
| Python-first authoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Execution** |  |  |
| Incremental / partition-aware runs | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Quality** |  |  |
| Built-in data quality / tests | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Horizontal scale (distributed executor) | ✓ | ✓ |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T21:27:51.763Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*