Dagster vs Databricks Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Dagster | Databricks | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $10/mo | Custom |
| Number of plans | 3 | 7 |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
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
Data Engineering
- Orchestrate data processing, machine learning and analytics pipelines
- Build streaming and batch pipelines
- Ingest data from a wide variety of sources with in-built connectors
- Lakeflow Jobs
- Lakeflow Pipelines
- Lakeflow Connect
Data Warehousing
- Run SQL queries for BI reporting, analytics and visualization to get timely insights from data lakes
- Available in both Classic and Serverless (managed) Compute
Interactive workloads
- Run interactive data science and machine learning workloads
- Build and deploy custom applications with the full security and governance of the Data Intelligence Platform
- Compute for Data Science
- Databricks Apps
Operational Database
- Fully-managed Postgres transactional database for serving data and features to support applications built on Databricks
Artificial Intelligence
- Build production-quality GenAI or ML apps across any use case
- AI Gateway
- Agent Bricks
- AI Functions
- Model Serving
- Foundation Model Serving
- Proprietary Foundation Model Serving
- AI Search
- Agent Evaluation
- Model Training
- AI Runtime
Genie
- AI assistance for every team, across code, analytics, and enterprise knowledge
- Ask in natural language and get trusted, governed answers from your data
- Genie One - Enterprise Knowledge
- Genie Spaces - Natural Language Q&A
- Genie Code - AI Coding Assistant
Platform
- Cross platform capabilities for governance, management and security
- Managed services that automate the ongoing optimization and maintenance of your data lake
- Tiers and Add-ons
- Managed Services
- Data Transfer and Connectivity
- Storage
- Delta Share from SAP BDC
- Collaboration
Dagster vs Databricks 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?
- Neither has a free plan. But Dagster and Databricks 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. 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. Databricks: Databricks plays in the premium enterprise data platform space, competing directly with Snowflake and Google BigQuery — they're not trying to win on price, they're winning on unified platform breadth (data engineering + ML + warehousing in one place). The all-custom pricing signals they're targeting mid-market and enterprise accounts with real budget, not self-serve startups.
Still deciding? See the best Dagster alternatives or the best Databricks alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Dagster and Databricks and let you know when something moves.