Apache Airflow vs Flyte

Apache Airflow is a platform for authoring, scheduling, and monitoring workflows written in Python. It is designed for batch workflows with a defined beginning and end that run on a schedule. Its web application lets users manage and schedule workflows, trigger DAGs manually, inspect task status and logs, backfill runs, and rerun failed tasks. A modular architecture uses a message queue to coordinate workers and can orchestrate an arbitrary number of them. Built-in operators connect workflows to Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other services. The community maintains more than 80 separately installable provider packages, which can be upgraded or downgraded independently of Airflow core. Airflow can read connections, variables, and configuration from secret backends, but those integrations do not support writes. JWT authentication is used for its public REST API and internal Execution API. From Airflow 3 onward, sensitive credentials are masked in logs, the interface, and API output. Airflow is free to download and use under the Apache License.

Flyte 2 is a durable runtime for AI workloads involving training, serving and agents. Users write workflows as plain Python async functions and use a TaskEnvironment to declare images, resources, secrets and retry policies. Flyte resumes from failed tasks and can recover from out-of-memory kills, preempted nodes and disappearing GPUs. Branches, loops and runtime decisions support dynamic workflows and agents. Native serving integrations include Streamlit, FastAPI, vLLM, SGLang and Ollama, with replicas able to scale to zero when idle. Listed integrations also cover Apache Spark, Ray, PyTorch Elastic, BigQuery, Snowflake, Weights & Biases, OpenAI Agents SDK, LangGraph, CrewAI, Pydantic AI, MLflow, Dask and Databricks. It runs locally with a devbox or on a customer cluster. Union.ai says customer-cloud data planes keep workflow inputs, outputs, logs, code and reports outside its control plane. Flyte is available as free Apache 2.0 open-source software.