Astronomer vs Dagster (2026): which should you pick?

Pick Astronomer if

• Fits if you already write Airflow DAGs and don't want to run the servers
• Works for teams that want a trial with no card before committing

Look elsewhere if

• Pricey if you leave a deployment running all month, at $0.35 an hour before workers
• Skip it if you want a fixed monthly price, because workers, clusters and add-ons bill separately
• Tight if you're staying free, as there's only a 14-day trial
• Watch out: Business and above show a quote only, and cloud networking costs are passed through

Pick Dagster if

• Fits if your team writes Python and thinks of pipelines as tables and files
• Works for data teams that want a hosted console but can self-host the core later

Look elsewhere if

• Skip it if you can't write Python, as pipelines are code
• Tight if you're not paying: no free hosted plan, only a 30-day trial
• Watch out: credits are charged per asset and per op on top of $10 or $100 a month
• Watch out: the site says Dagster is now part of Prefect, so plans and branding may change

Astronomer

• Deployments, workers, dedicated clusters, Observe and Otto are each billed separately, so the monthly total depends on usage.
• Prices shown are the monthly-billing view; Business and above show only a quote on the annual view.
• Networking costs are passed through from the cloud provider.
• Astro Private Cloud has no published price.

Dagster

• Usage is billed in credits: one per asset materialized and one per op executed, on top of the monthly fee.
• There is no free hosted plan; the trial lasts 30 days, though the core framework can be self-hosted.
• Cost tracking, role scoping by project and several alert types are limited to the Pro plan.
• The site says Dagster is now part of Prefect, so plans and branding may change.

Astronomer

Managed Airflow deployments

Each deployment includes the scheduler, webserver and triggerer, sized to the Dag volume and billed at a fixed hourly rate by size.

Workers that scale to zero

Workers run individual Airflow tasks in seven sizes (A5 to A160) from $0.13 an hour and scale down when idle.

Astro Observe

Cost and performance metrics, root-cause analysis and lineage for Airflow pipelines, priced as a percentage of compute costs.

Otto data engineering agent

An agent for Airflow and Astro work, charged with an intelligence fee from $1.25 per million tokens plus model provider costs.

Dedicated clusters and networking

Standard multi-tenant clusters are included at no cost; dedicated single-tenant clusters start at $2.40 an hour.

Private Cloud option

Astro Private Cloud runs Airflow in your own environment, with multi-cluster management and air-gapped deployment support.

Dagster

Asset-based orchestration

Pipelines are modeled as assets with dependencies, alongside workflow-based orchestration for work that is not tied to a data asset.

Data catalog and lineage

Asset metadata, asset-level lineage and, on Starter and above, catalog search; column lineage is listed on the comparison table.

Data quality checks

Asset checks, freshness policies and dbt test integration surface the health of each asset.

Insights and alerts

Pipeline metrics with a 30-day lookback and alerts by email, Slack or Teams; cost tracking for BigQuery and Snowflake is a Pro feature.

Hybrid or Serverless compute

Run on Dagster Serverless, billed at $0.010 a minute, or on your own infrastructure in Hybrid mode with no compute charge from Dagster.

Open-source core

The core orchestration framework is open source on GitHub and can be self-hosted; Dagster+ adds branch deployments, RBAC and cost insights.

Astronomer

• Developer$0.35

  per hour per deployment, billed monthly

  For building and testing pipelines: scale-to-zero compute, hibernating deployments, API access and rollbacks.

• Team$0.42

  per hour per deployment, billed monthly

  Adds observability and data quality, dedicated clusters, high availability, 7-day audit logs and 24x5 support.

• BusinessCustom

  Annual quote. Adds SSO enforcement, CI/CD enforcement, 90-day audit logs and 24x7 support with a 1-hour SLA.

• EnterpriseCustom

  Annual quote. Adds remote execution agents, custom RBAC, SCIM, IP access lists and organization dashboards.

• Enterprise Business CriticalCustom

  Annual quote. Adds cross-region disaster recovery and 24x7 support with a 30-minute SLA.

Dagster

• Solo$10

  per month, plus $0.040 per credit

  1 user, 1 code location and 1 deployment for personal projects. Serverless compute is $0.010 a minute.

• Starter$100

  per month, plus $0.035 per credit

  Up to 3 users, 5 code locations, 1 deployment and catalog search. Serverless compute is $0.010 a minute.

• ProCustom

  Unlimited code locations and deployments, cost tracking and insights, uptime SLAs and a private Slack channel. Sold through sales.