About Maestro
Maestro is a general-purpose workflow orchestrator from Netflix. Internally it works as a fully managed workflow-as-a-service for data platform users, a community that includes data scientists and engineers, machine learning and software engineers, content producers and business analysts.
According to the README, it schedules hundreds of thousands of workflows and millions of jobs each day and operates under a strict service level objective even during traffic spikes. It is described as highly scalable and extensible, supporting existing and new use cases with an emphasis on usability. Repository topics mention DAGs, ETL and ELT, MLOps, batch processing, data pipelines and agentic workflows. The engine is written in Java.
Maestro is licensed under Apache-2.0 and is run on your own infrastructure; there is no hosted version from the maintainers. It suits data and platform engineering teams that need an orchestrator built for very large-scale scheduling.
Key features
- Managed workflow-as-a-service orchestration
- Scheduling at very large scale
- Extensible for new use cases
- DAG-based workflow definitions
- Suited to ETL and MLOps pipelines
- Written in Java
Good fit for
- →Large-scale data pipeline scheduling
- →Machine learning workflow orchestration
- Built with
- Java
- Tags
- workflow-orchestration
- scheduler
- data-pipelines
- dag
- java
- mlops
- netflix
- etl
Maestro: questions and answers
- What is Maestro used for?
- Maestro is Netflix's open-source workflow orchestrator, a scalable and extensible engine for scheduling data, ML and engineering workflows. It is a good fit for large-scale data pipeline scheduling and machine learning workflow orchestration.
- Is Maestro open source?
- Yes. Maestro is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Netflix/maestro and is written mainly in Java.
- Is Maestro free?
- Yes. Maestro is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Maestro?
- Yes. Maestro can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What are some alternatives to Maestro?
- Similar open-source tools in the Data Pipelines & ETL category include Airflow, Dagster and Prefect. SaaS products in the same category include Astronomer, AWS Glue and Estuary.
- Is Maestro actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Maestro was on 30 September 2026. The project has 3.8k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to Maestro
See all
Airflow
Data Pipelines & ETL
Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows
Apache-2.0vs Astronomer★ 47k
Dagster
Data Pipelines & ETL
An orchestration platform for the development, production, and observation of data assets.
Apache-2.0vs Astronomer★ 16k
Prefect
Data Pipelines & ETL
Prefect is a workflow orchestration framework for building resilient data pipelines in Pyt
Apache-2.0vs Astronomer★ 24k
Kafka
Data Pipelines & ETL
Apache Kafka - A distributed event streaming platform
Apache-2.0vs Striim★ 34k
Kestra
Data Pipelines & ETL
Event Driven Orchestration & Scheduling Platform for Mission Critical Applications
Apache-2.0vs AWS Step Functions★ 29k
Airbyte
Data Pipelines & ETL
Airbyte is the open-source data movement platform. Run ELT pipelines across 700+ connector
OSSvs Fivetran★ 22k
SaaS alternatives to Maestro
See all
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
Estuary
Data Pipelines & ETL
Real-time data pipeline platform that unifies CDC, streaming and batch ELT
SaaS
Google Cloud Dataflow
Data Pipelines & ETL
Managed stream and batch data processing service on Google Cloud based on Apache Beam
SaaS
Hevo Data
Data Pipelines & ETL
No-code data pipeline platform for replicating data into warehouses and lakes
SaaS
IBM DataStage
Data Pipelines & ETL
Enterprise ETL tool for designing and running data integration jobs
SaaS

