Astro by Astronomer vs. dbt

Astronomer is well suited for workflow and dependency management for enterprise-level data lakes. It is not a product for data processing though. Different source systems can be integrated, it also provides powerful interfaces for alerting and monitoring. Easy to build DAGs, graphical UI, API support makes the product more user-friendly as well. Astronomer also does a great job on user training.

Incentivized

The prerequisite is that you have a supported database/data warehouse and have already found a way to ingest your raw data. Then dbt is very well suited to manage your transformation logic if the people using it are familiar with SQL. If you want to benefit from bringing engineering practices to data, dbt is a great fit. It can bring CI/CD practices, version control, automated testing, documentation generation, etc. It is not so well suited if the people managing the transformation logic do not like to code (in SQL) but prefer graphical user interfaces.

Incentivized

• Workflow management
• Wide availability of plugins
• Dependency management on upstream

Incentivized

• dbt supports version control through GIT, this allows teams to collaborate and track the data transformation logic.
• dbt allows us to build data models which helps to break complex transformation logic into simple and smaller logic.
• dbt is completely based on SQL which allows data analyst and data engineers to build the transformation logic.
• dbt can be easily integrated with snowflake.

Incentivized

• More language agnostic
• Flexible fork and join capabilities
• Near real time UI updates in case of deployment of enhanced DAGs

Incentivized

• Field-level lineage (currently at table level)
• Documentation inheritance - if a field is documented the downstream field of the same name could inherit the doc info
• Adding python model support (in beta now)

Incentivized

dbt is very easy to use. Basically if you can write SQL, you will be able to use dbt to get what you need done. Of course more advanced users with more technical skills can do more things.

Incentivized

Astronomer is a fast, secure, scalable workload management solution. It provides world-class user training along with easy to interact support.

Incentivized

I actually don't know what the alternative to dbt is. I'm sure one must exist other than more 'roll your own' options like Apache Airflow, say, bu tin terms of super easy managed/cloud data transforms, dbt really does seem to be THE tool to use. It's $50/month per dev, BUT there's a FREE version for 1 dev seat with no read-only access for anyone else, so you can always start with that and then buy yourself a seat later.

Incentivized

• It helps to build scalable, available and low maintenance workloads
• Integrated Alerts and notifications helps to detect load issues in the early stages
• Ensures meeting data SLAs

Incentivized

• Simplified our BI layer for faster load times
• Increased the quality of data reaching our end users
• Makes complex transformations manageable

Incentivized