Census vs Astronomer Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Census | Astronomer | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | Custom |
| Number of plans | 4 | 5 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
Free
- 500,000 monthly active rows (MAR) for connections
- 3,500 monthly active rows (MAR) for activations
- 5,000 monthly model runs (MMR) for transformations
Standard
Popular- Unlimited users
- 15-minute syncs
- 700+ fully managed connectors
- 200+ fully managed activation destinations
- Integration for dbt Core™
- Role-based access control
- Access to Fivetran REST API
- Access to SSH tunnels for encryption
Enterprise
- 1-minute syncs
- Fivetran Activations' Audience Hub
- Enterprise database connectors
- Custom roles
- VPN tunnels (annual contract only)
- SCIM/user provisioning
- Pick any cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure)
- Hybrid deployment option
Business Critical
- Customer-managed keys for encryption
- PCI DSS Level 1 certification
- Private networking options
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
Census vs Astronomer 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?
- Census has a free plan. Astronomer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Census: Opaque custom pricing across all paid tiers signals they're not trying to win on being the cheapest option — they're positioning against tools like Hightouch and Segment as a data activation layer for teams already invested in a modern data stack. The free tier and 14-day trial per connection are the low-friction entry points to get teams hooked before the sales motion kicks in. 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.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Census and Astronomer and let you know when something moves.