Great question! Short answer: “Customer‑Managed Prefect” (often called “Self‑Managed Prefect”) is the enterprise edition of Prefect that you run on your own infrastructure. It delivers the full Prefect Cloud feature set (RBAC, SSO, SCIM, audit logs, etc.) but the control plane lives in your VPC/datacenter instead of Prefect’s SaaS. Here’s how the three options compare at a glance: - Prefect OSS (open source) - What it is: Free, open‑source orchestration you can run entirely yourself. - Who hosts the control plane (API/UI/DB): You do (self‑hosted server). - Feature set: Core orchestration and UI. No built‑in enterprise org features (SSO/SAML, advanced RBAC, SCIM, audit logs). - Support: Community best‑effort. - Good fit for: Individuals, prototypes, cost‑sensitive teams comfortable operating everything themselves. - Learn more: Cloud vs OSS, Self-hosting the Prefect server (docs) - Prefect Cloud (SaaS) - What it is: Prefect’s fully managed control plane with multiple pricing tiers. - Who hosts the control plane: Prefect (SaaS). - Feature set: Rich UI and observability, projects/workspaces, roles and permissions, SSO/SAML/OIDC, SCIM, audit logs, policy controls, plus optional Prefect Serverless for on‑demand execution. Hybrid execution lets you keep code and data in your infra while the control plane is managed by Prefect. - Support: Commercial support and SLAs on paid tiers. - Good fit for: Most teams that don’t want to run/maintain the control plane. - Learn more: Cloud vs OSS, Pricing - Customer‑Managed (Self‑Managed Prefect, Enterprise) - What it is: The enterprise distribution of Prefect Cloud that you deploy on your own infrastructure (private cloud/on‑prem). You keep all control-plane metadata in your environment. - Who hosts the control plane: You do (with Prefect’s enterprise tooling and support). - Feature set: Enterprise features from Cloud (SSO/SAML/OIDC, SCIM user provisioning, advanced RBAC, audit logs, workspace isolation, governance/policy controls), plus enterprise support and upgrade guidance. Designed for strict data residency/compliance and private networking. - Support: Enterprise support with SLAs. - Good fit for: Organizations with regulatory or security requirements that prohibit SaaS control planes or require full data residency. - Learn more: Prefect Enterprise, Cloud vs OSS. For details and a demo: Contact sales. Key differences called out: - Hosting model - OSS: you host and operate everything yourself - Cloud: Prefect hosts the control plane (you can still keep execution in your infra via hybrid execution) - Customer‑Managed: you host the enterprise control plane in your environment - Features/governance - Enterprise controls (SSO, SCIM, advanced RBAC, audit logs) are part of Cloud paid tiers and Customer‑Managed; they are not included in OSS - Operations and support - OSS is community‑supported; Cloud and Customer‑Managed include commercial support and SLAs (Customer‑Managed adds enterprise deployment/upgrade assistance) - Compliance/data residency - Customer‑Managed keeps all control‑plane metadata fully within your environment; Cloud is a managed SaaS; OSS is self‑hosted but lacks enterprise governance features If you can share your constraints (e.g., must keep all metadata in‑house, need SSO/SCIM, air‑gapped, expected scale), I can recommend the best fit and outline next steps for setup.