Prefect vs Airflow: Which Should You Self-Host?

Quick Verdict Airflow is the safer choice for self-hosted data pipeline orchestration. It's battle-tested, has a massive ecosystem, and its architecture is well-documented for self-hosting. Prefect offers a more modern, Pythonic API that's genuinely nicer to write, but its self-hosted server has historically been a second-class citizen compared to Prefect Cloud — and the resource difference for self-hosting is minimal. Overview Apache Airflow is the industry-standard platform for orchestrating data pipelines. Created at Airbnb in 2014 and now an Apache Software Foundation project, it's used by thousands of companies for ETL, ML pipelines, and batch processing. Workflows (DAGs) are defined in Python, scheduled via the webserver, and executed by workers. Prefect is a modern workflow orchestration framework that positions itself as a simpler alternative to Airflow. It uses native Python — you decorate functions with @flow and @task , and Prefect handles scheduling, retries, and observabil