Astronomer vs Kestra (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 Kestra if

• Fits if you are an engineer who wants to own the orchestrator
• Works for data teams already using dbt, Spark or Kafka

Look elsewhere if

• Skip it if you do not write YAML or run servers
• Tight if you need SSO, roles, audit logs or multi-tenancy, as those are Enterprise
• Watch out: no Cloud or Enterprise price is published
• Watch out: you run and upgrade the platform yourself

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.

Kestra

• No Cloud or Enterprise price is published; Cloud is by access request and Enterprise by contact with sales.
• SSO, role-based access, audit logs and multi-tenancy are Enterprise Edition features.
• Workflows are defined in YAML, so it assumes engineering skills.
• Self-hosting means running and upgrading the platform yourself.

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.

Kestra

Declarative workflows

Workflows, triggers and dependencies are written as YAML, versioned in Git and deployed through CI/CD.

Code and no-code editors

Flows can be written in code or built in a visual editor.

Event-driven scheduling

Flows run on schedules, on events or through the API, with retries, backfills and failure handling.

2,600+ plugins

Plugins and scripts orchestrate SQL, Python, shell, APIs, Terraform, dbt and Spark in one workflow.

AI features

An MCP server for AI agents is in open source; an agentic AI copilot on any LLM is an Enterprise feature.

Enterprise governance

Enterprise adds SSO, LDAP and SCIM, role-based access, audit logs, multi-tenancy and secrets management.

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.

Kestra

• Open Source$0

  Self-hosted under Apache 2.0. Unlimited flows and executions, queue on PostgreSQL or MySQL.

• CloudCustom

  Managed by Kestra with scaling and enterprise plugins; priced by usage, access by request.

• Enterprise EditionCustom

  Annual subscription per instance, with SSO, RBAC, audit logs, worker groups and SLA support.