Dagster vs Prefect
No clear leader: Dagster (70.4) and Prefect (69.8) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
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
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.
Prefect
A workflow orchestration platform that enables teams to build resilient automated processes using Python, with features like automatic retries, state tracking, and run observability. Supports flexible deployment options ranging from managed cloud infrastructure to self-hosted environments on Kubernetes or user-provided compute.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Dagster
From $120/month. 30-day free trial. Subscription with metered credits (asset materializations and ops executed); serverless compute charged separately.
- Solo$120/month with 7.5k credits/month included; overages at $0.040/credit
- 1 User
- 1 Code location
- 1 Deployment
- Core orchestration
- Asset-based orchestration
- +6 more
- Starter$1200/month with 30k credits/month included; overages at $0.035/credit
- Up to 3 Users
- 5 Code locations
- 1 Deployment
- Catalog search
- Column-level lineage
- +8 more
- Pro/EnterpriseContact sales
- Unlimited code locations
- Unlimited deployments
- Custom serverless compute pricing
- Cost tracking and insights
- Personalized onboarding support
- +8 more
Prefect
Free tier. Starter from $100/mo. Team at $100/user/mo. Enterprise custom pricing.
- HobbyFree
- workflow scheduling
- workflow observability
- logging & alerting
- Starter$100/mo
- bring your own compute
- webhooks
- API access
- Team$100/user/mo
- service accounts
- audit logging
- team collaboration
- EnterpriseContact sales
- SSO (SAML/OIDC)
- RBAC with object-level ACLs
- multiple workspaces
- directory sync (SCIM)
- IP allowlisting
- +1 more
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
Dagster
- Snowflake
- Spark
- Databricks
- Azure
- AWS
- Airbyte
- Tableau
- Soda
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- PagerDuty
- Datadog
- Python
Prefect
- Pydantic AI
- OpenAI
- AWS Secrets Manager
- HashiCorp Vault
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.