head to head · open source
dagster vs lancedb
dagster has 16,183 GitHub stars, 2,296 forks, 2,589 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lancedb has 11,473 stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagster leads on adoption by 41% (16,183 vs 11,473 stars). dagster is written in Python under Apache-2.0; lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. dagster has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, lancedb 9%. lancedb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| dagster | lancedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick dagster if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick lancedb if
- You want the lancedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and lancedb fits your workflow better
About dagster
Dagster is a cloud native data pipeline orchestrator written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning teams who declare the tables, data sets, models, and reports their pipelines should produce and need those assets tested, observable, and kept up to date from local development through production.
read the full dagster overview →
About lancedb
LanceDB is an open source, developer friendly embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI, maintained in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It describes itself as a multimodal AI lakehouse: a single place where developers can build, train and analyze AI workloads over vectors, metadata and multimodal data such as text, images, videos and point clouds. It is built on top of the Lance columnar format, which provides the storage layer for efficient storage and analytics.
read the full lancedb overview →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More Machine Learning Infrastructure projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Machine Learning Infrastructure field.
Frequently asked questions
Is dagster or lancedb more popular?
dagster has 16,183 GitHub stars and lancedb has 11,473. dagster has the larger community by that measure.
Are dagster and lancedb free?
Both are open source. dagster is licensed under Apache-2.0 and lancedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dagster and lancedb?
dagster is written in Python and lancedb in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, dagster or lancedb?
Choose dagster if you want the larger community (16,183 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose lancedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.