Astronomer vs Prefect 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 | Prefect | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | $100/mo |
| Number of plans | 5 | 5 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | — | |
| Pricing model | usage-based | hybrid |
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
Hobby
- Workflow scheduling
- 2 users
- Up to 5 deployments
- 500 min of Prefect Serverless
- Workflow observability
- Logging & alerting
- 7 days run retention
Starter
- 3 users
- Up to 20 deployments
- 75 hours of Prefect Serverless
- Bring your own compute
- Webhooks
- 1,250 API requests/min
Team
- 4-8 users
- Up to 100 deployments
- 225 hours of Prefect Serverless
- Service accounts
- 24 hour audit log
- 50 automations
Pro
- 5-20 users
- Up to 1,000 deployments
- 250 hours of Prefect Serverless
- Multiple workspaces
- SSO (SAML/OIDC)
- Basic RBAC
Enterprise
- 5+ users
- Unlimited deployments
- Custom Prefect Serverless
- RBAC + ACLs
- Directory Sync (SCIM)
- IP allowlisting & PrivateLink
Astronomer vs Prefect 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?
- Prefect 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 Prefect goes with hybrid. 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. Prefect: They're positioned in the mid-market sweet spot — not trying to undercut Airflow's self-hosted free tier, but not as aggressively priced as Dagster Cloud or as enterprise-heavy as Astronomer. The $100/user/mo Team tier targets growing data engineering teams who've outgrown DIY orchestration but aren't ready for a six-figure platform deal.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Astronomer and Prefect and let you know when something moves.