Redpanda 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.
| Redpanda | Astronomer | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | Custom |
| Number of plans | 3 | 5 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | hybrid | usage-based |
Serverless
- Multi-tenant AWS, GCP
- 100 MB/s max write throughput
- 300 MB/s max read throughput
Bring Your Own Cloud
- In your cloud AWS, Azure, GCP
- 2 GB/s max write throughput
Enterprise Edition
- Built-in HTTP proxy & schema registry
- Prometheus support
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
Redpanda 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?
- Redpanda has a free plan. Astronomer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Redpanda 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. Redpanda: They're positioning as the leaner, faster alternative to Kafka and Confluent — free tier undercuts Confluent's entry cost entirely, but the custom pricing on BYOC and Enterprise signals they're not chasing bargain-bin buyers. This is a middle-to-premium play aimed at infra teams who are tired of Kafka's operational overhead and want something simpler without going full-managed-and-locked-in like Confluent Cloud. 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.
Still deciding? See the best Redpanda alternatives or the best Astronomer alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Redpanda and Astronomer and let you know when something moves.