Alternatives to Airflow
6 alternatives found
Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow orchestration platform for authoring, scheduling, and monitoring data pipelines, created at Airbnb in 2014 and donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2016. Airflow represents pipelines as DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) written in Python — each DAG defines tasks and their dependencies, and Airflow schedules and executes them on a configurable backend (Celery, Kubernetes, LocalExecutor).
Prefect
Modern Python orchestration — cloud-native, better DX, dynamic workflows without DAG constraints
Dagster
Asset-centric orchestration with built-in data catalog and software-defined assets
dbt
SQL transformation layer — Airflow often orchestrates dbt jobs as tasks
Apache Flink
Stream processing engine — Airflow is batch-oriented, Flink handles real-time data
Temporal
General workflow orchestration — better for long-running business processes beyond data pipelines
Luigi
Simpler Python pipeline framework by Spotify — less operational overhead than Airflow
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