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Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow vs Astro by Astronomer comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

JAMS Scheduler
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon Managed Workflows fo...
Ranking in Workload Automation
21st
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Astro by Astronomer
Ranking in Workload Automation
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.9
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS Scheduler is 3.4%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is 1.8%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Astro by Astronomer is 1.3%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS Scheduler3.4%
Astro by Astronomer1.3%
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow1.8%
Other93.5%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

LV
Principal Data Base And Infrastructure Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Automation has replaced nightly monitoring and delivers reliable, unified job scheduling
We have really enjoyed working with JAMS in terms of notifications, alerts, and streamlining. There used to be a process with Automate, which is another product from Fortra, but even before that, the other division of the company that we were merging with had a tool that was built in-house called a file handler or file distributor. It was an in-house developed tool, but it was not as streamlined or as efficient as JAMS is. We literally had to have a dedicated nighttime person monitoring. Although we are 24/7, the divisions of the company that we were using JAMS for have been small scale. While we have automated it, we have streamlined it in such a way that notifications go out and alerts go out, but if there is anything, then we get paged and alerted, and if anything needs to happen at midnight, we can wake up. On the other hand, with the tool I mentioned, the file handler and distributor, we used to have a dedicated nighttime person that had to be sitting and monitoring it to see when a file arrived, whether it met the conditions, and then execute the next particular job. By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this.
IP
Business and Technology Strategy Lead at Cognix Inc
Operational workflows improve as we address needs but technical support costs affect resources
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is easy to use and offers great scalability. The more we include and extend our capabilities, we can easily scale up according to our needs. When we compare it to other tools in the market, such as Control-M and other technologies, Airflow offers a lot of flexibility. Using this tool minimizes costs and maximizes efficiency.
FS
Data Platform Engineer at Babbel
Unified orchestration has reduced costs and improves governance for complex data workflows
I would say it would be much more helpful if Astro by Astronomer can provide an MCP to use and integrate with Astro by Astronomer and their AI agent Auto, so that we can use our tools like Claude, Code, or Cursor to have a central location where we integrate that MCP in Databricks via the AI gateway, and then we can have a place where we can connect to Astro by Astronomer, Databricks, other tools such as Jira and DataDog, and then have a much more comprehensive analysis and overview and monitoring of the entire data ecosystem. Having an MCP integration would tremendously help us to have a more comprehensive data platform that is more AI-ready. That is one of the features that I can think of. Another thought would be having an integration with Kubernetes instead of just scheduling everything on Astro by Astronomer workers. That would be helpful. One thing I can think of is that the Astro by Astronomer local developer environment can be improved further, but perhaps that is a very niche use case that I have in mind, and it may not be useful for others. There is room for improvement around having an improved UI and also integration with other tools. On governance, I would say we can have a more granular level of governance even inside workspaces. Having much more granular control over people belonging to the same team in Astro by Astronomer could have different access to different DAGs, depending upon our tagging strategy. That is one of the areas I can suggest in terms of improvement. The AI capabilities can be improved further. I would compare the current AI capabilities to newer models provided by Claude such as Opus or Codex.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"It's worth its weight in gold and we cannot get rid of it now."
"In summary, this product is top class."
"What my team needs are tools to reliably execute all the jobs, minimize the risks, and support high-availability, and JAMS does the job."
"The dashboard is intuitive."
"Getting JAMS in place was a game changer for us back then."
"The key benefits about JAMS is having the ability to run long running jobs on-premise as compared to products like Azure Data Factory."
"One of the product's main strengths is that it is well-suited for a DevOps pattern, allowing us to automate our CI/CD pipeline."
"Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is easy to use and offers great scalability; the more we include and extend our capabilities, we can easily scale up according to our needs."
"The best features Astro by Astronomer offers, in my opinion, are easy setup and good tutorials."
"Astro by Astronomer has positively impacted my organization because it is open source code, so we can use it in AWS, Azure, GCP, or on servers that we have on-premise, ensuring we can use it in every situation."
"Astro by Astronomer has positively impacted my organization because it has helped me save time due to the big support and large community, allowing them to help me solve problems that I encounter while working with Astronomer."
"Astro by Astronomer has positively impacted my organization by making work easier; tasks are getting completed in much less time than before."
"The positive impact of Astro by Astronomer has mainly been on team productivity and the standardization of development."
"My experience with customer support has been quite pleasant, as we always get a response."
"In one year, we save a lot of time using Astro by Astronomer because we do not need to deploy different components of Airflow one by one."
"It is mainly an improved version of Apache Airflow, and it has improved everything from the open source Airflow."
 

Cons

"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"The tabs in the JAMS file transfer could be clearer. It would help us demonstrate to our client that JAMS not only automates jobs but also does fast transfers, and it's an alternative that supports and filters different kinds of platforms. Filtering file transfers will be highly beneficial to them."
"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"I would enhance the compatibility feature of JAMS because sometimes when the server is under high load, it does not inform us and we cannot get answers."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"One issue which can prevent jobs from running is when a script gets into a loop."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"To be very honest, technical support from AWS is extremely expensive."
"The documentation provided is good."
"I think Astro by Astronomer can be improved for newcomers, especially regarding the installation, making it more friendly for Windows users, as we use WSL update."
"Astro by Astronomer could improve by reducing costs or decreasing infrastructure management and having less dependency on Kubernetes so that the infrastructure is simpler."
"I would recommend making it easier to read the logs in Astro by Astronomer because the logs are pretty hard to follow, especially for the pipelines that are processing much data, such as our DBT, where we have issues finding something in the logs."
"Overall, my experience with Astro by Astronomer was very positive, but there are a few areas where it could improve."
"One challenge I find with Astro by Astronomer is the cost because it is relatively higher than other tools."
"The documentation part of Astro by Astronomer can be made easier and more generic, not specific to the integration with each of the services."
"Astro by Astronomer is doing great, and while improvement opportunities exist, particularly around the cost model, which can occasionally feel steep, I generally find it quite favorable."
"I believe one area for improvement for Astro by Astronomer would be to further expand the documentation and examples for more advanced scenarios, especially involving integrations with AWS, Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and Astronomer Cosmos."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"Definitely check how many single processes you want to run and count them as jobs. That is how you would work out your pricing on JAMS. For example, if you're running a number of commands and you can put them all into one script and run that script, you can count that as one job."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"It is not an inexpensive solution but it is less expensive than other options."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Educational Organization
13%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise23
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences. I would like to ...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My primary use case for JAMS is enterprise workload automation and batch job orchestration. I use it to schedule and ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Customization in general depends on the use cases that we are trying to address, but I don't have a specific thing ri...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Custom Generalizations do not directly correlate with specific sections conventional to reviews. Less clarity on dire...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Our use case for Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is more focused on operational workflow. We created an o...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Astro by Astronomer?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been very good.
What needs improvement with Astro by Astronomer?
Astro by Astronomer can be improved; they are doing a lot of progress on observability. How to see how all the pipeli...
What is your primary use case for Astro by Astronomer?
My main use case for Astro by Astronomer is to manage our data pipelines, to run DBT processes, and to run all data f...
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow vs. Astro by Astronomer and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
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