Dagster ranks #6 in Data Engineering & ETL/ELT Pipelines AI search.

Dagster Labs (operating as Elementl, Inc. d.b.a. Dagster Labs) is a San Francisco-based data infrastructure company founded in 2018 by Nick Schrock. The company builds Dagster, an open-source, cloud-native data pipeline orchestration platform licensed under Apache 2.0. Dagster's defining architectural innovation is the Software-Defined Asset model, which treats data tables, ML models, and datasets as first-class, versioned objects with built-in lineage, quality checks, and observability rather than treating pipelines as ordered task lists. The managed cloud offering, Dagster+, adds a data catalog, cost insights, branch deployments, and CI/CD tooling. Dagster is used by teams at companies including Kraft Heinz, Bayer, Fanatics, AMD, and Kahoot. The GitHub repository has over 15,100 stars and 627 contributors.

Dagster is a Python-native, open-source data orchestration platform built around a Software-Defined Asset model, enabling data engineers to declaratively define, schedule, monitor, and observe data pipelines as versioned data assets with integrated lineage and quality checks. The commercial Dagster+ offering adds a managed data catalog, observability dashboards, CI/CD branch deployments, cost insights for Snowflake and BigQuery, and Compass—an AI data analyst that surfaces warehouse insights directly in Slack.