Prefect
platformMaker of Prefect, an open-source Python data-orchestration platform.
Prefect Technologies, Inc. is a U.S. software company headquartered in Washington, D.C., founded in 2018 by Jeremiah Lowin. It builds Prefect, an open-source data-workflow orchestration platform written in Python. Prefect competes directly with Apache Airflow; its founder was a longtime Airflow contributor who created Prefect to address limitations he encountered in that project.
Our Take
We shortlist Prefect for data teams that find Airflow heavy and want a Python-native orchestrator. The trade-off against Airflow is ecosystem size, which we weigh against developer-experience gains per engagement. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen
What Sets Prefect Apart
Prefect was created by a longtime Apache Airflow contributor specifically to reduce orchestration boilerplate, which makes the lighter, more Pythonic developer experience its central and deliberate differentiator.
Key Achievements
About Prefect
Prefect Technologies develops Prefect, an orchestration platform for building, scheduling, and monitoring data pipelines and workflows in Python. The company was founded in 2018 by Jeremiah Lowin, who had spent several years contributing to Apache Airflow and built Prefect to reduce what he termed "negative engineering," the defensive code teams write to handle failure, retries, and scheduling rather than business logic.
The Prefect engine is open-source and lets developers turn ordinary Python functions into observable, retryable workflows with less boilerplate than older orchestrators require. The company monetises through Prefect Cloud, a managed service for scheduling, observability, and team collaboration. Prefect raised an $11.5 million Series A and a $32 million Series B, both in 2021, with the Series B led by Tiger Global. It competes with Apache Airflow, Dagster, and other code-first orchestrators, positioning on a lighter, more Pythonic developer experience.