Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Dagster VS AWS Step Functions

Compare Dagster VS AWS Step Functions and see what are their differences

Dagster logo Dagster

The cloud-native open source orchestrator for the whole development lifecycle, with integrated lineage and observability, a declarative programming model, and best-in-class testability.

AWS Step Functions logo AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
  • Dagster Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-22
  • AWS Step Functions Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-29

Dagster features and specs

  • Modular Design
    Dagster's modular architecture allows users to build reusable components, known as Solids and Dagsters, which promote organized and maintainable code.
  • Type Safety
    Dagster offers strong type safety, enabling users to define input and output types for all computations, reducing runtime errors and improving code reliability.
  • Integrated Scheduler
    Dagster includes a built-in scheduler, allowing for seamless workflow automation and easy management of recurring data processing jobs.
  • Rich Metadata
    Dagster provides extensive metadata for tracking the flow and results of data jobs, aiding in debugging and improving transparency in pipeline execution.
  • Interoperability
    The platform supports integrations with various tools, including Pandas, Spark, and dbt, enhancing its capability to work across different data ecosystems.
  • User Interface
    Dagster features a sophisticated web-based UI for visualizing pipelines and monitoring job runs, which enhances user experience and accessibility.

Possible disadvantages of Dagster

  • Learning Curve
    New users may find the framework's concepts and structure complex, leading to a steeper learning curve compared to simpler orchestration tools.
  • Limited Community Support
    Compared to more established tools, Dagster's community is smaller, potentially leading to less available third-party resources or slower responses to issues.
  • Integration Complexity
    While Dagster offers many integrations, configuring them can be complex and sometimes requires a deep understanding of both Dagster and the external tools.
  • Evolving Platform
    Being a relatively newer platform, Dagster is still evolving, which might lead to breaking changes or instability as it matures.

AWS Step Functions features and specs

  • Orchestration
    AWS Step Functions provide a way to coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows, making it easier to build and run distributed applications and microservices.
  • Visual Workflow
    The service offers a visual interface to build, run, and monitor multi-step workflows, allowing for easier debugging and comprehension of complex processes.
  • Error Handling
    Step Functions offer built-in error handling, retry logic, and state management, which simplifies the process of managing failures and ensures more robust applications.
  • Scalability
    As a fully managed service, AWS Step Functions handle the scaling of operations automatically, allowing workflows to scale based on demand without manual intervention.
  • Integration
    Deep integration with other AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, SNS, SQS, and DynamoDB, making it straightforward to build complex, integrated workflows.
  • Cost-Effectiveness
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model means you only pay for each state transition, which can be more cost-effective compared to maintaining your own orchestration layer.
  • Audit and Logging
    Automatically logs the state of each execution, which can be used for auditing, debugging, and monitoring purposes.
  • Serverless
    Being a serverless service, it eliminates the need for server management and scaling concerns, ensuring a simpler operational setup.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Step Functions

  • Complexity
    For simple tasks, the overhead of creating and managing workflows with Step Functions can be excessive compared to using straightforward AWS Lambda functions or other simple services.
  • Cold Start Latency
    Like other serverless services, AWS Step Functions can suffer from cold start latency, especially in low-usage scenarios.
  • Cost
    While the pay-as-you-go model can be cost-effective, for workflows with a high number of state transitions, costs can accumulate quickly, making it potentially expensive.
  • Service Limits
    AWS Step Functions have certain limits, such as the number of active state machines per account and state transition limits, that could impact very large scale operations.
  • Learning Curve
    There can be a significant learning curve associated with mastering the service, particularly for those unfamiliar with AWS or similar orchestration tools.
  • JSON-Based Definitions
    State machines are defined in JSON, which can become complex and less readable when dealing with large workflows involving multiple states.
  • Limited Regional Availability
    As with many AWS services, Step Functions are not available in all regions, which can limit its use for global applications.

Dagster videos

Airflow Vs. Dagster: The Full Breakdown!

More videos:

  • Review - Dagster Data Orchestration 10 min walkthrough
  • Review - Apache Airflow vs. Dagster

AWS Step Functions videos

Orchestrating Distributed Business Workflows with AWS Step Functions - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Parallelism and concurrency in Step Functions and AWS Lambda
  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Workflows for development and testing

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Dagster and AWS Step Functions)
Data Integration
57 57%
43% 43
Workflow Automation
42 42%
58% 58
Project Management
0 0%
100% 100
Analytics
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Dagster and AWS Step Functions. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Dagster and AWS Step Functions

Dagster Reviews

5 Airflow Alternatives for Data Orchestration
Dagster is an open-source data orchestration system that allows users to define their data assets as Python functions. Once defined, Dagster manages and executes these functions based on a user-defined schedule or in response to specific events. Dagster can be used at every stage of the data development lifecycle, from local development and unit testing to integration...
Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
Unlike Airflow, which supports any production environment, Dagster concentrates on cloud services and supports modern data stacks. Being cloud-native and container-native, this solution makes the scheduling and execution processes easier. Dagster was created with such specific goals in mind: designing ETL data pipelines, implementing machine learning curves, and managing...
Source: blog.skyvia.com
10 Best Airflow Alternatives for 2024
Dagster is a Machine Learning, Analytics, and ETL Data Orchestrator. Since it handles the basic function of scheduling, effectively ordering, and monitoring computations, Dagster can be used as an alternative or replacement for Airflow (and other classic workflow engines).
Source: hevodata.com

AWS Step Functions Reviews

Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
This service suits for many use cases, such as building ETL pipelines, orchestrating microservices, and managing high workloads. AWS Step Functions is particularly efficient when combined with other AWS solutions: Lambda for computing, Dynamo DB for storage, Athena for Analytics, SageMaker for machine learning, etc.
Source: blog.skyvia.com
10 Best Airflow Alternatives for 2024
AWS Step Functions enable the incorporation of AWS services such as Lambda, Fargate, SNS, SQS, SageMaker, and EMR into business processes, Data Pipelines, and applications. Users and enterprises can choose between 2 types of workflows: Standard (for long-running workloads) and Express (for high-volume event processing workloads), depending on their use case.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, AWS Step Functions seems to be a lot more popular than Dagster. While we know about 67 links to AWS Step Functions, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Dagster. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Dagster mentions (5)

  • Data Orchestration Tool Analysis: Airflow, Dagster, Flyte
    Data orchestration tools are key for managing data pipelines in modern workflows. When it comes to tools, Apache Airflow, Dagster, and Flyte are popular tools serving this need, but they serve different purposes and follow different philosophies. Choosing the right tool for your requirements is essential for scalability and efficiency. In this blog, I will compare Apache Airflow, Dagster, and Flyte, exploring... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Data Engineering with DLT and REST
    This article demonstrates how to work with near real-time and historical data using the dlt package. Whether you need to scale data access across the enterprise or provide historical data for post-event analysis, you can use the same framework to provide customer data. In a future article, I'll demonstrate how to use dlt with a workflow orchestrator such as Apache Airflow or Dagster.``. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • How I've implemented the Medallion architecture using Apache Spark and Apache Hdoop
    Instead of the custom orchestrator I used, a proper orchestration tool should replace it like Apache Airflow, Dagster, ..., etc. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • AI Strategy Guide: How to Scale AI Across Your Business
    Level 1 of MLOps is when you've put each lifecycle stage and their intefaces in an automated pipeline. The pipeline could be a python or bash script, or it could be a directed acyclic graph run by some orchestration framework like Airflow, dagster or one of the cloud-provider offerings. AI- or data-specific platforms like MLflow, ClearML and dvc also feature pipeline capabilities. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • What are some open-source ML pipeline managers that are easy to use?
    I would recommend the following: - https://www.mage.ai/ - https://dagster.io/ - https://www.prefect.io/ - https://metaflow.org/ - https://zenml.io/home. Source: almost 2 years ago

AWS Step Functions mentions (67)

  • Create Stateful Serverless Workflows with AWS Step Functions and JSONata
    As an avid user of AWS Step Functions, I've been pleased by several excellent releases over the past few years, including Distributed Map, Express Workflows, Intrinsic functions, TestState, redrive, service integrations, and so many others. Those are all fantastic releases, but in my humble opinion, none of them are as big of a deal as the introduction of JSONata expressions. AWS announced this game-changing... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Automate Email Processing using Event Driven Architecture and Generative AI
    Because the code above enables EventBridge events on the bucket, we can then create a new EventBridge rule to trigger a StepFunction that will then process the emails as follows:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What is AWS Step Functions? - A Complete Guide
    AWS Step Functions is one of those game-changing services that has completely changed how I approach this problem. Today, I want to share my experience with Step Functions and how it can simplify your serverless workflows. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Large-scale Data Processing with Step Functions : AWS Project
    The solution uses AWS Step Functions to provides end to end orchestration for processing billions of records with your simulation or transformation logic using AWS Step Functions Distributed Map and Activity features. At the start of the workflow, Step Functions will scale the number of workers to a (configurable) predefined number. It then reads in the dataset and distributes metadata about the dataset in batches... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • How to invoke a lambda function from your database
    If you need to run long-running jobs, consider using AWS Step Functions in tandem with Lambda functions. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Dagster and AWS Step Functions, you can also consider the following products

Apache Airflow - Airflow is a platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines.

Kestra.io - Infinitely scalable, event-driven, language-agnostic orchestration and scheduling platform to manage millions of workflows declaratively in code.

Prefect.io - Prefect offers modern workflow orchestration tools for building, observing & reacting to data pipelines efficiently.

n8n.io - Free and open fair-code licensed node based Workflow Automation Tool. Easily automate tasks across different services.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Make.com - Tool for workflow automation (Former Integromat)