Here are some key advantages of Prefect over Airflow based on the information retrieved:
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Code as Workflows: Prefect allows you to define workflows directly in Python code without needing to define a rigid DAG structure. This makes building and understanding workflows more intuitive.
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Seamless Onboarding and User Experience: Prefect provides a smoother onboarding experience, with simpler usage patterns and consolidated observability tools in one UI.
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Flexible Flow Deployment: Prefect offers more flexibility for deploying flows, supporting easier promotion of flows through development, staging, and production environments.
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First-class Subflows: Prefect 2 introduces a more flexible and modular way to organize workflows without needing the traditional "flow-of-flows" pattern. This simplifies complex nesting.
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Elimination of Flow Pre-registration: In Prefect, you don’t need to pre-register your flows, which offers more flexibility.
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Open-source Features: Features such as notifications are available in the open-source version of Prefect, unlike Airflow, which often requires additional setup or enterprise versions for similar capabilities.
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Native Async Support and Pydantic Validation: These are available out-of-the-box, simplifying modern Python development tasks.
For deeper comparison, you can view the differences directly in the Prefect migration guide, here:
https://docs.prefect.io/latest/guides/migration-guide/
In summary, Prefect offers a more modern, flexible, and streamlined approach to defining and managing workflows compared to Airflow.