head to head · open source
dagster vs txtai
dagster has 16,168 GitHub stars, 2,294 forks, 2,589 open issues and last shipped today. txtai has 12,957 stars, 891 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. dagster leads on adoption by 25% (16,168 vs 12,957 stars). dagster is written in Python under Apache-2.0; txtai is written in Python under Apache-2.0. dagster has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, txtai 7%. dagster was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (python), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| dagster | txtai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 891 |
| 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 txtai if
- You want the txtai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and txtai 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 txtai
txtai is an all in one AI framework for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows, written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Python machine learning ecosystem and is built on Hugging Face Transformers, Sentence Transformers and FastAPI. The core component is an embeddings database, which is a union of vector indexes (both sparse and dense), graph networks and relational databases. That foundation enables vector search and also serves as a knowledge source for large language model applications.
read the full txtai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dagster or txtai more popular?
dagster has 16,168 GitHub stars and txtai has 12,957. dagster has the larger community by that measure.
Are dagster and txtai free?
Both are open source. dagster is licensed under Apache-2.0 and txtai under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dagster and txtai?
dagster is written in Python and txtai in Python. 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 txtai?
Choose dagster if you want the larger community (16,168 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose txtai if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.