About Azkaban
Azkaban is a workflow manager that lets teams define, schedule and monitor batch job workflows made up of dependent tasks. It is aimed at data engineering teams who need to orchestrate multi-step jobs, such as data pipelines, in a way that is easier to operate than raw cron scripts.
It is built with Java and Gradle and requires Java 8 or newer to build. The project is organized around releases tagged in its GitHub repository, and its documentation, currently being migrated to a new site, is maintained alongside the code in the repository's docs directory, with contributions to both the software and the documentation welcomed through pull requests.
Azkaban is released under the Apache-2.0 license and is typically deployed as a self-hosted service within a company's own infrastructure to run and track scheduled workflows.
Key features
- Workflow and job dependency management
- Scheduling for batch jobs and pipelines
- Web UI for monitoring workflow runs
- Java and Gradle-based build
- Self-hosted deployment
Good fit for
- →Orchestrating multi-step data pipelines
- →Scheduling dependent batch jobs
- Built with
- Java
- Tags
- workflow-engine
- scheduling
- java
- batch-processing
- self-hosted
- data-pipelines
Azkaban: questions and answers
- What is Azkaban used for?
- Azkaban is a free, Apache-licensed workflow and job scheduling manager written in Java, used to orchestrate batch jobs and data pipelines. It is a good fit for orchestrating multi-step data pipelines and scheduling dependent batch jobs.
- Is Azkaban open source?
- Yes. Azkaban is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at azkaban/azkaban and is written mainly in Java.
- Is Azkaban free?
- Yes. Azkaban is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Azkaban?
- Yes. Azkaban can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What are some alternatives to Azkaban?
- Similar open-source tools in the Data Pipelines & ETL category include Kestra, Kafka and Prefect. SaaS products in the same category include Google Cloud Dataflow, Amazon Kinesis and Astronomer.
- Is Azkaban actively maintained?
- The most recent commit to Azkaban was on 3 July 2024, and the latest release is 4.0.0, published on 17 March 2021. The project has 4.5k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to Azkaban
See all
Kestra
Data Pipelines & ETL
Event Driven Orchestration & Scheduling Platform for Mission Critical Applications
Apache-2.0vs AWS Step Functions★ 29k
Kafka
Data Pipelines & ETL
Apache Kafka - A distributed event streaming platform
Apache-2.0vs Striim★ 34k
Prefect
Data Pipelines & ETL
Prefect is a workflow orchestration framework for building resilient data pipelines in Pyt
Apache-2.0vs Astronomer★ 24k
Airbyte
Data Pipelines & ETL
Airbyte is the open-source data movement platform. Run ELT pipelines across 700+ connector
OSSvs Fivetran★ 22k
Mage AI
Data Pipelines & ETL
🧙 Build, run, and manage data pipelines for integrating and transforming data.
Apache-2.0vs Fivetran★ 8.8k
Maestro
Data Pipelines & ETL
Maestro: Netflix’s Workflow Orchestrator
Apache-2.0★ 3.8k
SaaS alternatives to Azkaban
See all
Google Cloud Dataflow
Data Pipelines & ETL
Managed stream and batch data processing service on Google Cloud based on Apache Beam
SaaS
Amazon Kinesis
Data Pipelines & ETL
AWS services for collecting, processing and analyzing real-time streaming data
SaaS
Astronomer
Data Pipelines & ETL
Managed Apache Airflow platform for orchestrating data pipelines
SaaS
AWS Glue
Data Pipelines & ETL
Serverless data integration service on AWS for ETL jobs and data catalogs
SaaS
Confluent
Data Pipelines & ETL
Managed Apache Kafka platform for streaming data in the cloud
SaaS
Estuary
Data Pipelines & ETL
Real-time data pipeline platform that unifies CDC, streaming and batch ELT
SaaS

