Mage vs Prefect

Mage is a web platform for building and operating data workflows. Its listed functions include workflow scheduling, pipeline monitoring, data quality checks, and version control. Integrations cover Stripe, Salesforce, BigQuery, HubSpot, databases, SaaS APIs, cloud storage, files, and streams. Hybrid deployment is available. Mage has a free plan, while Starter costs $29 a month, billed monthly, plus $0.50 per CPU-hour. Starter includes one developer seat, one development environment, and 50 AI credits per month. Team costs $100 a month, billed monthly, plus $0.50 per CPU-hour; it supports up to 10 developer seats, includes one environment, and provides 250 shared AI credits per month. Mage is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States.

Prefect is a workflow orchestration platform for data, machine learning and agent workflows written in Python. Its open-source framework lets users add decorators to existing Python code to create workflows, without a rigid DAG structure or custom DSL. Execution features include state tracking, automatic retries, caching and recovery from failures. For observability, Prefect provides run timelines, logs and alerts for failures, missed SLAs and late runs. Workflows can run on cron or event-driven schedules, support backfills, and be triggered by webhooks, cloud events or state changes. Deployment choices include managed serverless execution, hybrid execution in a customer’s infrastructure, and self-hosted orchestration. In hybrid mode, workers connect through outbound-only connections while code and data stay in the customer’s infrastructure; Prefect Cloud hosts the control plane and metadata. The free Hobby plan is limited to two users, five deployments, 500 minutes of monthly serverless credits and seven days of run retention. Paid plans start at $100/mo.