Astronomer vs Prefect (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 Prefect if

• Fits if you write Python and want scheduling, retries and run history
• Makes sense if you want an open-source core you can self-host

Look elsewhere if

• Not for you if you don't write code, as workflows are Python functions
• Tight if you grow past Hobby: 2 users, 5 deployments and 7 days of run history
• Pricey if you need Team: it starts at 4 users at $100 each, so $400 a month
• Watch out: SSO, SCIM, RBAC and an uptime SLA are Enterprise only
• Watch out: there is no free trial of paid plans, the Hobby plan stands in for it

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.

Prefect

• The Hobby plan stops at 2 users, 5 deployments and 7 days of run retention.
• Team starts at 4 users at $100 per user per month, so the cheapest Team bill is $400 a month.
• SSO, SCIM, object-level RBAC and an uptime SLA are Enterprise-only; Starter and Team have no SLA.
• The pricing page says it offers no free trial of paid plans; the Hobby plan serves that purpose.

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.

Prefect

Flows from plain Python

Adding a decorator to a Python function makes it a flow with retries, state tracking and artifacts, without a separate DAG definition language.

Scheduling and deployments

Flows are packaged as deployments that can be scheduled, triggered by webhooks or events, and run remotely on work pools you configure.

Prefect Serverless

Managed compute run by Prefect, so flows can run without hosting your own infrastructure. Each paid plan includes a monthly allowance of it.

Observability and automations

Run logs, alerting and event-driven automations that send notifications or trigger runs when something in a workflow changes state.

Open-source core

The orchestration framework is open source and can be self-hosted; Prefect Cloud is the hosted version with more governance and scale features.

Security and compliance

Prefect states SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA and GDPR alignment, with hybrid and VPC deployment options on higher plans.

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.

Prefect

• Hobby$0

  2 users, 5 deployments, 500 min/mo of Prefect Serverless, logging and alerting, 7-day run retention.

• Starter$100

  per month for up to 3 users, billed monthly

  20 deployments, 75 hours/mo of Prefect Serverless, bring your own compute, webhooks and 1,250 API requests/min.

• Team$100

  per user / month, for 4 to 8 users, billed monthly

  100 deployments, 225 hours/mo of Prefect Serverless, service accounts, 24-hour audit log, email support.

• EnterpriseCustom

  SSO (SAML/OIDC), RBAC and ACLs, SCIM, multiple workspaces, unlimited deployments and a 99.9% uptime SLA. Annual billing; sold through sales.

Astronomer

No public discounts listed.

Prefect

• Startups

  Prefect Startup Program

  The pricing page says eligible startups get credits toward the Team plan through the Prefect Startup Program; qualification is by application.