We performed a comparison between Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Business Process Management (BPM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Development on Apache Airflow is really fast, and it's easy to use with the newer updates. Everything is in Python, so it's not hard to understand. They also have a graphical view, so if you are not a programmer and you are just an administrator, you can easily track everything and see if everything is working or not."
"Designing processes and workflows is easier, and it assists in coordinating all of the different processes."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it straightforward to operate, offering a plethora of features for data preparation, buffering, and format conversion."
"I found the following features very useful: DAG - Workload management and orchestration of tasks using."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"This is a simple tool to automate using Python."
"Apache Airflow is in Python language, making it easy to use and learn."
"We're running it on a virtual server, which we can easily upgrade if needed."
"One can rate all the calls and that is a good feature."
"AWS Step Functions acts as a high-level layer, allowing us to seamlessly integrate with microservices."
"The solution is stable...The solution is easy to scale."
"It's a general solution that you can adapt to your own needs and is simple to use. We like that it can be integrated with everything in the AWS suite, and that the creation of the pipeline can be done using the graphical user interface."
"The number of historical events is great."
"It is a scalable solution."
"What I like the most about Amazon Step Functions is how easy it is to use."
"It's Amazon, it's scalable."
"Enhancements become necessary when scaling it up from a few thousand workflows to a more extensive scale of five thousand or ten thousand workflows."
"One specific feature that is missing from Airflow is that the steps of your workflow are not pipelined, meaning the stageless steps of any workflow. Not every workflow can be implemented within Airflow."
"The dashboards could be enhanced."
"We cannot run real-time jobs in the solution."
"Programmatically, it's very good, and it doesn't have any competitors, but you cannot develop anything in Airflow UI. You need to develop everything within the program. In the market, other tools have come up recently as competitors to Airflow, and they also give graphical programming options, whereas Airflow doesn't provide that feature currently. All the DAGs you want to build need to be coded in Python."
"There is an area for improvement in onboarding new people. They should make it simple for newcomers. Else, we have to put a senior engineer to operate it."
"I would like to see some no-code capabilities and drag and drop abilities in Airflow."
"I have some issues with the solution's communication."
"It is hard to coordinate the declaratory language."
"Setup took about one day. We had some errors to understand in the beginning, but now everything is working good."
"The interface can sometimes feel limited, as we're unable to see what AWS is running behind the scenes."
"It wasn't easy to understand the licensing model. It's like if you use just a little, it's cheap, but it becomes more expensive as you use more. It's like a hook that ties you inside the Amazon ecosystem. So, it creates a dependency."
"The solution's data size limit can be improved."
"I would like to see more data transformation features in Amazon Step Functions like additional operators and logic."
"The price and support are areas with shortcomings where the solution needs to improve."
"The solution's pricing could be cheaper. It is cheaper than Airflow."
Apache Airflow is ranked 2nd in Business Process Management (BPM) with 31 reviews while AWS Step Functions is ranked 12th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 9 reviews. Apache Airflow is rated 8.0, while AWS Step Functions is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Apache Airflow writes "Enable seamless integration with various connectivity and integrated services, including BigQuery and Python operators ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of AWS Step Functions writes "Simplifies complex task automation and enhances development workflows while offering user-friendly interface, seamless scalability and efficient workflow orchestration". Apache Airflow is most compared with Camunda, IBM BPM, Informatica Cloud API and App Integration, IBM Business Automation Workflow and Bizagi, whereas AWS Step Functions is most compared with Camunda, IBM BPM, Pega BPM, Oracle BPM and IBM Business Automation Workflow. See our AWS Step Functions vs. Apache Airflow report.
See our list of best Business Process Management (BPM) vendors.
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