Insights from data practitioners
around the globe.
The State of Apache Airflow® 2026 Report draws on insights from 5,800+ data practitioners worldwide, the largest data engineering survey ever. Blending responses from the Airflow community and trends from Astro customer usage data, it offers the clearest view yet into how Airflow and the role of the data engineer is evolving.
"Airflow being the unified operational platform for data, model, and decisions, creates the potential for a future where Airflow is the operational context graph platform necessary for an enterprise where humans and AI agents work side by side. This State of Airflow report captures an exciting moment in the project’s history, with all signals suggesting that Airflow’s biggest days lay ahead of us."
Vikram Koka
Chief Strategy Officer at Astronomer and Apache Airflow PMC Member
Airflow is powering mission-critical pipelines.
With the release of Airflow 3 in 2025, data teams unlocked new capabilities for AI and MLOps. See how early adopters are shipping faster, scaling AI workloads, and gaining a competitive edge in 2026.
Your Airflow pipelines are business critical.
Airflow supports more than internal dashboards. 89% of users expect to use Airflow for more revenue-generating and/or external solutions next year, while ETL and ELT remain foundational use cases.
Airflow gets AI into production.
Orchestration-first organizations deliver production AI while competitors stagnate. 32% of Airflow users have GenAI or MLOps use cases. Among Astro customers, this jumps to 62%.
Leading data teams are adopting Airflow 3.
Airflow 3 has a fast adoption curve for enterprise infrastructure with data teams at WeWork, Glassdoor, and Foursquare, already using Airflow 3 to take advantage of faster scheduling, stronger security, and production-ready MLOps workflows.
