Dagster
Asset-centric DataOps platform that orchestrates, observes and activates data across your stack.
By Dagster Labs · 4.5/5 Value-Position score (estimate)
Positioning guardrails
Best for
- Data platform teams standardising orchestration on assets, lineage and data quality
- Companies migrating off cron jobs, Airflow or YAML-heavy schedulers
- Regulated teams that must keep compute and data inside their own cloud
- Organisations that want an open-source core with a managed control plane
Ideal size: 10–100 people · Mid-market to enterprise with a data platform or data engineering team
Not for
- Non-technical teams looking for no-code ETL or BI tooling
- Buyers who need a packaged, industry-specific analytics application
- Very small shops with a handful of pipelines and no Python skills
Value metrics scorecard
Time-to-Value
2–4 weeks to a first production pipeline
~14 days to first production value
Total Cost of Ownership
$12,000/yr
Starts at $120 · Pay-as-you-go subscription plus credits: Solo $10/mo, Starter $100/mo, credits $0.035–$0.040 each, serverless compute $0.010/min; Pro quoted annually.
Implementation Friction
3/5
Engineering + admin effort required
Value-Position score
out of 5 · model estimate
Full cost breakdown
Mandatory implementation fee
None
Seat tiers
Solo: 1 user; Starter: up to 3 users; Pro: contact sales (unlimited code locations and deployments)
Add-on costs
- Serverless compute billed at $0.010 per minute
- Usage billed per credit: $0.040 (Solo) or $0.035 (Starter)
- Pro plan adds custom invoicing, premium support and uptime SLAs at quoted pricing
Company & support
Who is behind Dagster, and how your team gets help once it is live.
Company
- Founded
- Not recorded
- Headquarters
- Not recorded
How you get support
- PhoneNot listed
- EmailNot listed
- Live chatNot listed
- Support portal / ticketsPaid plans
- Community forumAll plans
- Help centre / docsAll plans
- Dedicated account managerNot listed
- In person / on-siteNot listed
- Hours
- Not recorded
- Response time
- Not stated
Docs, Ask AI, GitHub Discussions and the Slack community are open to all users; Dagster+ Solo, Starter and Pro users get the Dagster+ Support Center. Pro adds premium support and uptime SLAs.
“Not listed” means the vendor’s public pages don’t mention that channel, not that it is unavailable. Ask about it during evaluation.
Market position
Where Dagster sits against its closest alternatives. Pick any two of cost, speed, friction and buyer score, and up to 9 companies to compare.
Quadrant view
Typical annual cost × Time-to-value
The lines cross at the median of the solutions shown, so about half sit on each side of each line. A dashed ring marks an outlier pinned to the edge; hover for its value.
Companies on the chart 6 / 10
- Dagster
- Octopus Deploy
- Spacelift
- Holistics
- Coalesce
- Appsmith
Add or change companies
Up to 10 companies including Dagster. Listed closest first.
Stack fit signal
Compatibility with standard B2B ecosystems.
No supported MCP path today, so it cannot be driven from an AI client.
AI & MCP readiness
What Dagster ships in AI, and what it asks of your ecosystem.
AI features shipped
Dagster+ AI adds in-product chat, issue detection with proactive monitoring and auto-implement, and Compass for building governed data agents; open-source Dagster ships skills for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. The pricing comparison shows the chat and monitoring features on the quoted Pro plan only.
Your data & models
- Trains on your data
- Not recorded — ask the vendor
- Runs on
- Not recorded
- AI pricing
- Paid add-on
In your ecosystem
- AI connection
- Not supported
- Model key
- Not recorded
- AI usage audit
- Not recorded
Compliance attestations
* IAPP AIGP certifies individuals, not products. It means named staff hold the credential — not that the platform does.
Bottom line
Dagster, from Dagster Labs (the site notes Dagster is now part of Prefect), is an asset-centric DataOps platform: an open-source orchestrator plus the managed Dagster+ cloud, with lineage, asset checks, a data catalog and Dagster+ AI. It integrates natively with dbt, Snowflake, Fivetran, AWS and dozens more. Solo is $10/mo, Starter $100/mo plus credits, Pro is quoted, and a free tier exists. Hybrid deployment keeps customer data in your own cloud; SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA are stated. Best for engineering-led data platform teams.
Frequently asked questions
What does Dagster cost and how is usage billed?
The open-source core is free. Dagster+ starts at $10/month (Solo, 1 user) or $100/month (Starter, up to 3 users), plus pay-as-you-go credits at $0.040 and $0.035 respectively and serverless compute at $0.010 per minute; a credit equals one asset materialization or executed op, and a 30-day free trial is offered. The Pro tier, which carries unlimited code locations, SSO/SAML, audit logs, cost tracking, Dagster+ AI and uptime SLAs, is quoted through sales with custom invoicing and ACH.
How long does it take to see value?
Get started free with the quickstart, Dagster University and a local dg CLI workflow, so a first pipeline can run within days. Production rollouts depend on your stack: referenced customers report developer onboarding shrinking from three months to one day, and one Fortune 500 company stood up a platform for 40 analysts in six months with two engineers. The 30-day trial lets you validate against real pipelines before committing.
Does Dagster support MCP or AI agents?
Partly. The pricing page lists a Dagster+ MCP server in preview across Solo, Starter and Pro plans, plus open-source Dagster skills for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, and the homepage describes Compass for building governed data agents. Dagster+ AI chat, issue detection and proactive monitoring are shown as Pro-only. The vendor does not name the foundation models behind these features, so model provenance and data-use terms should be confirmed during contracting.
Where does our data live under Dagster+?
With hybrid deployment your pipelines run in your own cloud, on-premise or Kubernetes environment while Dagster manages the control plane. The security page states that pipeline code and the customer data pipelines operate on stay fully within your environment and are never stored or accessed by Dagster+ hosted services; only customer metadata and log data are held. HTTPS in transit and encryption at rest are stated, along with SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA.
Who should not buy Dagster?
Teams without Python engineering capacity, and anyone shopping for a no-code ETL tool or a vertical analytics application. Dagster is code-first infrastructure: you define assets in code and the payoff comes from lineage, testability and operational discipline. Very small shops with a handful of pipelines may find lighter schedulers cheaper, and cost-sensitive buyers should note that the AI features sit on the quoted Pro tier rather than the self-serve plans.
What is Dagster's relationship with Prefect?
A banner across dagster.io states that Dagster is now part of Prefect, and the about page now describes Prefect while Dagster Labs is still named as the vendor on the security page. For procurement this means confirming the contracting entity, roadmap commitments and support obligations directly with the vendor during evaluation, since public documentation of the combined company is still evolving.