airflow open source analysis

Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows

Project overview

⭐ 43746 · Python · Last activity on GitHub: 2026-01-06

GitHub: https://github.com/apache/airflow

Why it matters for engineering teams

Apache Airflow addresses the challenge of managing complex workflows and data pipelines in a scalable and maintainable way. It allows engineers to author, schedule, and monitor workflows programmatically, which is essential for teams working on data integration, machine learning pipelines, and automation tasks. This open source tool for engineering teams is particularly suited to machine learning and AI engineering roles that require reliable orchestration of data processes. Airflow is a mature and production ready solution, widely adopted in industry with a strong community and proven stability. However, it may not be the best fit for simple or real-time workflows where lightweight schedulers or event-driven systems could be more efficient due to Airflow's batch-oriented design and operational overhead.

When to use this project

Airflow is a strong choice when you need a robust, self hosted option for orchestrating complex, batch-oriented workflows with clear dependencies. Teams should consider alternatives if their use case demands low-latency event processing or minimal infrastructure overhead.

Team fit and typical use cases

Machine learning and AI engineering teams benefit most from Airflow as they use it to automate and monitor data pipelines and model training workflows. It typically appears in products that require reliable data orchestration and integration across multiple services, such as ETL processes, data science platforms, and MLOps environments.

Best suited for

Topics and ecosystem

airflow apache apache-airflow automation dag data-engineering data-integration data-orchestrator data-pipelines data-science elt etl machine-learning mlops orchestration python scheduler workflow workflow-engine workflow-orchestration

Activity and freshness

Latest commit on GitHub: 2026-01-06. Activity data is based on repeated RepoPi snapshots of the GitHub repository. It gives a quick, factual view of how alive the project is.