dbt Labs 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.
| dbt Labs | Astronomer | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $100/mo | Custom |
| Number of plans | 4 | 4 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | hybrid | usage-based |
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
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
dbt Labs 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?
- dbt Labs has a free plan. Astronomer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. dbt Labs uses hybrid pricing, while Astronomer goes with usage-based. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. dbt Labs: dbt Labs sits mid-to-premium — pricier than scrappy open-source-first competitors but justified by being the category creator with the deepest ecosystem lock-in. They're not competing on price; they're betting that being the default choice for analytics engineering teams lets them charge for governance and scale features once you're hooked. Astronomer: Astronomer sits in the premium band of the managed-Airflow space — this isn't a scrappy open-source wrapper, it's the commercial layer for teams already committed to Airflow at scale. They're not competing on sticker price; they're competing for enterprises that want a vendor to own the operational headache of running Airflow reliably.
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