Census vs Dagster Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
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
Solo Plan
- Pay-as-you-go $0.040/credit
- 1 User
- 1 Code location
- 1 Deployment
- 30-day free trial
Starter Plan
- Pay-as-you-go $0.035/credit
- Up to 3 Users
- 5 Code locations
- 1 Deployment
- Catalog Search
- 30-day free trial
Pro Plan
- Unlimited code locations
- Unlimited deployments
- Cost Tracking and Insights
- Personalized Onboarding Support
- Private Slack channel
- Uptime SLAs
- Custom Security Questionnaires
Census vs Dagster 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. Dagster 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. Dagster: At $10-$100/mo for self-serve tiers, Dagster is undercutting Prefect and positioning against Airflow's operational overhead cost rather than competing on raw price with open-source. They're going after the mid-market data team that wants managed orchestration without paying Astronomer-level enterprise prices.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Census and Dagster and let you know when something moves.