top of page
Search
Writer's pictureAndres Namm

Comparing Airflow, Prefect, Dagster

Updated: Jul 30, 2022

I have started reading about alternatives to Airflow. Lately, Prefect and Dagster have come up quite a bit so I decided to do a short comparison of these technologies for my use case where I usually run up to a 100 short lived data movement tasks (Lambdas/Azure Functions/AWS Batch Jobs/ Container Instances) per day. After that the data transformation is done using DBT

​

Airflow

Prefect

Dagster

Managed Service Available

MWAA, Astronomer, GCP composer

You have to manage your own cluster for the workflows to run

Dagster cloud preview. It seems to still expect you to have your own agents to run the workflows on.

Local Testing convenience scale 1..5

2

5

5

Connectors

A lot of them

​You have to write your own

​You have to write your own

Coupled with data business logic

Nope, but a lot of users still couple it

More coupled

Most coupled with

Performance

Scheduler is the bottleneck

First impressions have been good

First impressions have been good


MANAGED SERVICES AVAILABLE

For me this is super important as I want to manage as little as possible. I would say that this is for me the biggest issue of Prefect. Dagster Cloud is still in preview so hard to comment here but they seem to be going with the same approach as Prefect. Airflow at the same time has some managed options but they start from 500 dollars a month which is annoingly too much for me.


LOCAL TESTING.

Although it's been made simpler thanks to Official Airflow docker image, Airflow is by far the most inconvenient here as you can't run Python scripts directly.
Dagster and Prefect work the best as you run them as regular Python functions

CONNECTORS

I want to run my business logic separately from my scheduler. The easier I can do it the better. So far I have not seen a very simple way to connect Dagster or Prefect with services like Lambdas or Azure Functions. These services expect you run the workflows under their management. Airflow provides a lot of connectors

COUPLED SCHEDULING AND BUSINESS LOGIC



PERFORMANCE

From literature it seems Prefect is the best here as it solves a lot issues that Airflow had with scheduling delays.


REFERENCES

Benefits of Dagster compared to Airflow https://dagster.io/blog/dagster-airflow

184 views0 comments

Comments


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page