A letter from Nick Schrock, founder and creator of Dagster
Today I have an important announcement to share: Prefect is acquiring Dagster Labs.
Why this makes sense #
Prefect and Dagster have been competitors for nearly a decade. But over that time, the products have evolved to be quite distinct and complementary.
Prefect is preferred by many machine learning and platform teams. It excels at dynamic workflows––newly relevant in the agentic era–– offers an extremely elegant Python API, and has the smoothest onboarding experience in the category. Dagster is the preferred solution for forward-looking data teams, with advanced capabilities in partitioning, lineage, cataloging, and scheduling.
Rather than continuing to converge on each other's strengths from opposite directions, we're combining them. The combined company can serve the full spectrum of orchestration needs better than either of us could alone.
What this means for Dagster users and customers #
Dagster is core to the strategy of the new combined company. Concretely:
The open-source project will be actively developed, not just maintained. Dagster OSS remains central to how innovative data teams build, and investment in the project continues.
Dagster+ continues under the Dagster+ brand. Your service, your contracts, and your support experience are unaffected. There is nothing you need to do.
Team continuity. About 40 members of the Dagster team, across all functions will be joining Prefect. The people who built Dagster and who you've worked with will still be building it.
The roadmap continues. The combined company will keep investing in the capabilities that made Dagster the choice of forward-looking data teams, while bringing Prefect's strengths in dynamic and agentic workloads to bear.
A personal note #
Lastly, I want to share that I'll be moving on from the project and company.
Building Dagster over the past eight years has been a privilege. I'm proud of what we built: a fundamentally different way to think about orchestration, centered on the assets that data teams actually care about. That vision is now in the hands of a strong combined team, and I'm confident in where they'll take it.
Thank you to our customers, our community, our contributors, and the Dagster team. It's been an honor.
If you have questions about the transition, reach out at our FAQ. — Nick