Prefect just bought Dagster, another big Airflow rival — and it’s not a data pipeline story

The New Stack · 3 months ago · 31

Prefect acquired Dagster, consolidating two major Apache Airflow competitors into a single company with 40 Dagster employees joining Prefect while maintaining separate product identities. The combined entity will offer orchestration for AI agents, with Dagster handling goal-setting through outcome tracking and Prefect managing execution, alongside Prefect's FastMCP tool for controlling agent interactions. Prefect aims to challenge Airflow's market dominance by combining both companies' strengths in workflow orchestration to serve the emerging agentic AI workload category.