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Dagster Labs vs dbt comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Dagster Labs
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
3.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
dbt
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (11th), Data Quality (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2858760 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Pipeline monitoring has improved and visual lineage now provides trusted, anomaly-aware data
There are many ways Dagster Labs can be improved. I believe the UI is very slow and it prevents loading state. Regarding needed improvements, I think there should be very good support available for migration if someone is migrating from a legacy system to Dagster Labs. Maybe that support needs to be better in a way that there should be customer service available for it, with more documentation or GitHub documentation that details what you should do and should not do, including do's and don'ts and how it will be beneficial or not beneficial. Something approach may be helpful during migration.
Harshwardhan Gullapalli - PeerSpot reviewer
AI Engineer at a educational organization with 51-200 employees
Data pipelines have improved financial accuracy and now build transparent audit-ready reports
As for something I wish we had, dbt's native support for Python transformations came later, and we did some complex financial classification calculations that felt clunky in pure SQL. We ended up writing Python in our n8n workflows and then fed the results back into dbt, which created a bit of a split-brain situation. If we would have had dbt Python models earlier, we could have kept that logic unified. Managing multiple reporting standards was our biggest operational pain point with dbt. We were running UAE corporate tax compliance and IFRS disclosure workflows simultaneously for different clients, and dbt does not have a native concept of multi-tenant or multi-standard project organization. Everything lives in one flat structure, so we had to build more conventions: separate schema folders for IFRS models versus UACT models, custom macros to tag models by compliance regime, and environment variables to control which set of transformations run for which client.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dagster Labs has positively impacted our organization by making it much easier to create data pipelines, helping us create new use cases, and allowing us to transform all of the data we have into features, which Dagster Labs has greatly assisted with."
"Dagster Labs has positively impacted my organization because whenever there is a change in the data, it becomes easy for me to schedule the job, run the changes, and make changes to be imported to the slowly changing dimension tables."
"Dagster Labs has provided a good sense of the data pipeline I have been using, and I have started to trust it even more because I have full confidence in whether it has been updated correctly and if it has failed."
"The most concrete outcome was a significant reduction in data errors reaching our downstream AI models, and after implementing dbt's testing layer, we caught roughly 70% of those issues at the transformation stage itself, before they ever touched the model."
"dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to create our data pipelines much faster, going from ingestion of data to creating a data product in weeks instead of months, and we can do it in-house with the skillset we already have."
"dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to expand the ceiling of complexity because once we have written the SQL, we can manage significantly more complexity since we are not spending all of our time doing it ourselves."
"Since we migrated from SSIS to dbt model architecture, it takes around four hours only to complete a full refresh, and the client is now happy because our downtime was drastically reduced when we perform a complete refresh of the data."
"There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors."
"From a developer point of view, I find the ease of development and the code to be the most useful capabilities of dbt."
"The product is developer-friendly."
"It is very convenient because at the end, I have the opportunity to orchestrate all my transformations in just one single place, rather than having them spread out."
 

Cons

"There are many ways Dagster Labs can be improved. I believe the UI is very slow and it prevents loading state."
"Dagster Labs is currently providing a Dagster University course, but those offerings are somewhat high-level."
"If I needed to name a few areas for improvement, I would mention the migration of code to Git and GitHub, which sometimes fails and can be confusing for developers during handover."
"The initial setup of dbt is somewhat complex."
"Since dbt has a license cost, if a company is small and does not have much budget, they can explore other tools because there are other tools that provide the same functionality at a lower cost."
"Dbt is not as stable as preferred, as it has had a few outages in the current year itself, so improvement should be made in the outages section as it is not stable."
"Managing multiple reporting standards was our biggest operational pain point with dbt."
"The main issue I have had with dbt is that when I start a project inside dbt, the structure I have to use is somewhat strict."
"dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub."
"If you compare the cost of those packages with dbt alone, it is more expensive to use dbt alone."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution’s pricing is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
31%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for dbt?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for dbt is that dbt is open source for its core modules, so the pricing, setup, and everything was really good.
What needs improvement with dbt?
dbt can be improved by introducing Python. Ideally, I would want to be able to orchestrate across the DAG and have both Python and SQL combined. The last time I used it, it was not able to visualiz...
What is your primary use case for dbt?
My main use case for dbt is data pipelines. I build data transformations and usually construct analytics pipelines.
 

Comparisons

 

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