Astronomer vs dbt Labs Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Astronomer | dbt Labs | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | $100/mo |
| Number of plans | 5 | 4 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | per-seat |
Developer
- AI-powered Dag authoring & debugging
- Flexible, scale-to-zero compute
- Hibernating deployments
- API access
- Deployment rollbacks
Team
- End-to-end observability & data quality
- Network isolation with Dedicated clusters
- High availability deployments
- Audit logging (7-day retention)
- 24x5 support availability
Business
- SSO enforcement
- CI/CD enforcement
- Audit logging (90-day retention)
- 24x7 support availability (1 hour SLA)
Enterprise
- Remote execution agents
- Cross-region Disaster Recovery (add-on)
- Custom RBAC
- SCIM provisioning
- IP access list
- Organization dashboards
Astro Private Cloud
- Manage deployments across multiple clusters and regions
- Air-gapped deployment support
- Enterprise SSO integration
- Deployment isolation
- Dynamic resources management
- In-place Airflow upgrades
- Houston API access
- Professional services installation assistance
- 24/7 committer-led support
Developer
- Browser-based IDE
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Job scheduling
- Keep on the latest dbt release
Starter
- dbt Catalog basic
- dbt Semantic Layer basic
- dbt Copilot code generation
- API access
Enterprise
- dbt Catalog advanced
- dbt Semantic Layer advanced
- dbt Copilot
- dbt Canvas
- dbt Insights
- dbt Mesh
Enterprise+
- PrivateLink
- IP Restrictions
- Rollback
- Hybrid projects
Astronomer vs dbt Labs FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- dbt Labs has a free plan. Astronomer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Astronomer uses usage-based pricing, while dbt Labs goes with per-seat. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Astronomer: Astronomer is positioning as the managed Airflow premium — not the cheapest way to run pipelines, but cheaper than building and maintaining your own Airflow infrastructure at scale. They're going after data engineering teams already bought into Airflow who want to offload ops, competing with MWAA and Cloud Composer on convenience and Airflow fidelity. dbt Labs: At $100/seat, they're not cheap — that's squarely mid-to-premium for a data transformation tool, putting them above scrappier open-source-first competitors but below full-stack data platform pricing. They're clearly targeting data-mature teams at growth-stage and enterprise companies, not early-stage shops watching every dollar.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Astronomer and dbt Labs and let you know when something moves.