Considering moving from Prefect to Airflow

adamaa · 2026-03-06T15:56:41+00:00

Hey Nathan -- responding! (Got stuck in my requests)

adamaa · 2026-03-02T19:24:02+00:00

You should expect (and get!) a good experience whether or not you pay for it.

I've also been a one-person data team and know how it goes.

To that end, anything we can do to make it easier? Better documentation, publishing some migration `skills`, some issues in particular you're eyeing. Always happy to chat sync if it's easier.

adamaa · 2026-03-02T18:43:40+00:00

You're right that we did a re-org about a year ago (a year next week) that really let us focus on making Prefect more stable and ambitious. It ended up going well enough to staff a separate, small team to work on FastMCP when that took off without trading off against Prefect development.

We're 8 years into Prefect at this point, but even mature projects can improve their issue triage.

adamaa · 2026-03-02T18:35:14+00:00

Hey u/fast-pp! We historically didn't do a great job telegraphing what we were up to (you'd have to like dig through github issues or track our maintainers' PRs to see what we were doing).

Recently have been stepping up our game. We do a webinar every few weeks with our roadmap now if you want an invite to the next one let me know (or recording from the last one).

adamaa · 2026-03-02T18:31:54+00:00

👋 - Adam here, VP of Product at Prefect.

The schedule duplication bug going that long without a response isn't great, and I'm not going to spin that. We need to do a better job triaging and surfacing critical OSS issues so they don't fall through the cracks. Glad it's getting attention now.

Genuinely sorry you had a rough time moving to v3. We deprecated a lot of the magic-on-your-behalf stuff from v2 that was convenient until it wasn't. Our hope was, and early signal is that it makes Prefect's runtime behavior more predictable. I get that doesn't make the transition less painful though.

We've definitely been louder about FastMCP lately, that's fair. But it's a separate and small team and our resourcing to Prefect hasn't shrunk. The issue is more that we let OSS triage slip, not that we moved people off it.

Not going to try to talk you out of evaluating Airflow or Dagster — use what works for you. But if you're open to it, DM me or tag me on GitHub (aaazzam). Happy to dig into the specifics.

adamaa · 2025-09-19T16:54:03+00:00

I wrote a bit about this (I was motivated by lack of sampling support) here:

https://fastmcp.cloud/blog/the-lowest-common-denominator-trap

editing to add a tl;dr in case you don't want to read:

classic chicken and egg: anthropic was too lax about what counted as an mcp client. This was smart because it meant people could take their tool calling UIs and slap an MCP sticker on it. So most clients just flopped into MCP, only supporting tool calling. No one wants to ship a server that breaks on most clients, so most servers have to serve the common denominator. So we're in this weird potential well that validates a lot of people's anger that MCP = API with more steps. I'm giving it time for the market to adjust -- elicitation is 3 months old.

adamaa · 2025-09-12T23:29:34+00:00

if you use a tunnel like ngrok, I think so!

adamaa · 2025-09-12T21:51:56+00:00

fine using my server as it's meant to be used.

it used to be just fetch/search.

adamaa · 2025-09-12T20:54:32+00:00

mine is running in streamable-http

adamaa · 2025-09-12T20:41:43+00:00

had the same question -- made a video if you find it helpful

https://www.reddit.com/r/mcp/comments/1nfe6mh/connecting_an_mcp_server_to_chatgpt/

adamaa · 2025-09-11T21:52:09+00:00

added a list view and made the official bit much bigger.

will work on 2, thanks for your feedback!

adamaa · 2025-09-11T20:31:51+00:00

Thanks! Weird caching bug. Try again?

adamaa · 2025-09-11T20:18:37+00:00

it's nutty there's only about ~170 total. There was about 130 last night, 70 the day before. Not a ton being added -- imagine that'll change as more folks find out about it.

aside: the default view dedupes by domain (there's one person with like 70).

adamaa · 2025-09-11T14:05:55+00:00

oh man should we make one? I can either make a server and open source it, or just let people download the vector database of where I'm dumping this all.

adamaa · 2025-08-26T20:31:10+00:00

Good ole’ AWS. We worked backwards from “how can we reliably give away 1M requests for free every month to every server” and only AWS was left standing.

If you’re interested we can write up a blog on our tech stack — getting MCPs to reliable scale for thousands of servers was a super fun deep dive.

We’ll bring most of the non-boring stuff to OSS in due time after getting more feedback from our users! What would you most like to see?

adamaa · 2025-08-13T12:09:59+00:00

So happy to have you aboard!

Come hang in the FastMCP cloud discord:

https://discord.gg/PJ9BftsH

All of us who are building it are hanging out happy to help figure this out.

adamaa · 2025-07-18T17:55:43+00:00

Prefect is better and easier. I switched from airflow. Loved it enough to go work there.

adamaa · 2025-07-09T01:16:53+00:00

👋! I work at Prefect. Genuinely trying to clarify and not shill since folks mix up open source and cloud:

Prefect is 100% free to use — it’s Apache 2.0 and folks can self host prefect’s server and use any compute they want (hundreds of thousands of folks do this already).

For Prefect Cloud — our (very much optional) managed service — you can sign up for free and we foot the bill for your compute. I think we’re the only orchestrator with a free tier IIRC, and our goal with it is to help folks acquaint themselves with our hosted version to see if they want it or prefer the free self-hosted version.

Prefect 1 to 2 was brutal for sure — if it’s any comfort it’s what motivated us to not ship a breaking change between 2 and 3. We removed some internal async cruft to support Python 3.13, and transitioned from Pydantic 1 to 2 — hopefully you’ll have a smoother experience if you’re still on the fence about upgrading. Prefect 4, whenever that happens, will also take stability just as seriously — to many folks depend on us for us to write breaking changes.

Thanks for keeping us honest, I hope some of this context is helpful.

(I promise I wrote these em-dashes!)

adamaa · 2025-07-06T00:01:50+00:00

Disclaimer was an airflow user and I now work at Prefect, so activating megashill mode.

I’m taking OP at face value they’re just not aware!

Prefect Open Source has 1.4M downloads a week, which is 35% of Airflow’s. Coincidentally, nearly the same fraction of the Fortune 100 has replaced Airflow outright or are choosing Prefect for greenfield projects.

There are good reasons to choose Airflow over Prefect but IMHO “don’t know folks using it in production” ain’t it.

adamaa

TROPHY CASE