Prefect is acquiring Dagster Labs to build the most innovative automation company for the age of AI.
For almost a decade, Prefect and Dagster have pushed each other to raise the bar for orchestration. That rivalry produced two of the most popular tools for data and machine learning teams. Today, we're bringing them together: Prefect is acquiring Dagster Labs.
Dagster stays Dagster.
If you're a Dagster user or customer, the most important thing to know is that nothing changes for you. Dagster and Dagster+ are here to stay. They're phenomenal products, and we're fully committed to their long-term maintenance, investment, and growth. Many members of the Dagster team are joining Prefect to continue their great work, and current and new Dagster+ customers can continue using these products exactly as they have been, with no changes or action required.
Prefect and Dagster were both founded in 2018, when most of the world's data work still ran on cron jobs and hand-tended DAGs.
The tools were old, the work was getting harder, and orchestration was ready to be reinvented. The two companies set out to do it from two different directions.
Dagster's answer was assets: declare the data that should exist, and let the system work out how to produce it and keep it fresh. That idea changed how data teams think about their work, and it created one of the most respected open-source communities in software.
Prefect's answer was execution: make the running of work itself dynamic and durable, so workflows hold their footing across environments and infrastructure, through failure, retries, and whatever production throws at them.
For eight years, that competition made both products sharper. Today, it turns out those approaches are more complementary than competitive. Teams that care about defining and validating their data choose Dagster. Teams that care about running complex, failure-prone workflows reliably choose Prefect. Plenty of organizations need both, and now they live under one roof, backed by a single company.
We're deeply grateful to Nick Schrock and Pete Hunt for building Dagster into what it is.
Nick created Dagster and shaped its open-source community from the ground up; Pete built the commercial business around it. The trust they've placed in us to steward what comes next is something we appreciate very much, and we encourage you to read Nick's own note to the Dagster community for his perspective on this transition.
This acquisition also marks a turning point for Prefect.
Over the past year, we've been operating as a profitable, fast-growing business, and that financial footing is what allows us to make long-term commitments to Dagster's community while also funding its future. With Dagster joining Prefect and FastMCP, we now have three major open-source product families, each with a commercial offering behind it.
AI is changing what teams need from automation. When software makes its own decisions, trust depends on three things: the outcomes it aims for, how it runs its work, and what it can access. Prefect's technology portfolio now covers all three: Dagster defines outcomes, Prefect executes the work, and FastMCP governs access. Engineering teams building AI-driven systems and agentic workflows need all three capabilities to work together, and that's why we're weaving them into the foundation of our next-generation platform for agent orchestration.
Outcomes layer
Dagster defines outcomes.
Execution layer
Prefect executes the work.
Access layer
FastMCP governs access.
We're using everything we've learned from a decade of orchestration to build something new for the problems teams are solving right now.
Happy engineering!