Largest data engineering survey ever highlights the criticality of Apache Airflow within enterprises, as well as the project’s continued growth and use case expansion
New York, New York – January 22, 2026 – Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the leading unified orchestration platform powered by Apache Airflow®, today announced the findings from the State of Airflow Report 2026. Based on responses from over 5,800 data practitioners across 122 countries, the State of Airflow Report 2026 surpasses last year’s survey as the world’s largest data engineering survey ever.
Every enterprise runs on data, and the most successful are realizing that good orchestration defines their competitive edge. Operationalizing AI, unifying complex data ecosystems, and building trustworthy data products all require reliable orchestration. Airflow sits at the heart of data-driven businesses, powering the pipelines that feed dashboards for decision-makers, providing in-product analytics, and orchestrating everything from machine learning models to AI agents in user-facing applications. All while providing ultimate flexibility to work with whatever data platforms are right for the job.
The Spring 2025 release of Airflow 3 pushed the project into its most transformative stage to date, advancing the future of data orchestration with new capabilities purpose-built for AI workloads, developer experience improvements, stronger security and greater flexibility for task execution. As a result, Airflow – a tool already central to the DataOps stack – is now positioned to help organizations manage large-scale, complex data workflows that power both AI applications and mission-critical business processes alike for years to come.
This year’s State of Airflow Report tells a clear story about the criticality of Airflow within respondents’ organizations and the impact of the project’s continued growth:
- Airflow Drives Business: 89% of Airflow users expect to use Airflow for more revenue-generating or external solutions this year.
- Airflow Gets AI into Production: 32% of Airflow users have GenAI or MLOps use cases in production. Among Astro customers, this number jumps to 62%. Among organizations that have been Astro companies for at least two years, the percentage increases to 83%.
- Airflow is Enterprise Trusted: 26% of users are already on Airflow 3, and 84% are currently gearing up to upgrade – a strong confidence signal in a new, major release. Astro customers are ahead once again, with 48% already having deployed Airflow 3, including 60% of large enterprise customers (50,000+ employees).
“The State of Airflow Report 2026 proves that Airflow and the orchestration layer unite tools, teams and technologies that power the world’s most intelligent data platforms,” said Pete DeJoy, CEO and Co-Founder, Astronomer. “Orchestration has moved from a business need to a strategic imperative, serving as the backbone of modern enterprise infrastructure. With 89% of Airflow users expecting to use Airflow for more revenue-generating or external solutions this year, it’s clear that Airflow is the undisputed standard for orchestration.”
Additional themes that emerged from the report include:
- Airflow has a key impact on data engineering careers, with 94% of respondents saying a strong foundation in Airflow skills will positively impact their career over the next five years
- Airflow enjoys strong support in the data engineering community, with the project reaching 43,800+ GitHub stars and 3,600+ unique contributors (more than Apache Spark or Apache Kafka).
- There is a clear need for dedicated advanced AI tooling like the Astro IDE. While over 80% of respondents use AI to write Airflow pipelines, they overwhelmingly report that generic AI tools are not up to the task, citing hallucinations, missing context and outdated syntax.
- Businesses have heterogeneous data stacks enabling them to evolve and avoid vendor lock-in with no clear winner in the data platform race, with Snowflake (36.6%), Databricks (34.7%) and BigQuery (27.8%) enjoying similar shares of adoption. Airflow operates as the nerve center of the modern data stack, plugging into any platform with an API to orchestrate your entire data ecosystem.
Report Methodology
Between September 15, 2025, and November 20, 2025, over 5,800 Airflow users worldwide participated in a 50-question survey covering how they run Airflow, develop pipelines and what they would like to see from future versions of Airflow. The complete State of Airflow Report 2026 is available here.
To learn more, visit the resources below:
- Download the complete State of Airflow Report 2026
- Read more in this blog post from Vikram Koka, Chief Strategy Officer at Astronomer and Apache Airflow PMC member
- Register for Astronomer’s The State of Airflow 2026 webinar on February 5
- Get started today for free with Astro IDE to ship data pipelines 10x faster
About Astronomer
Astronomer empowers data teams to bring mission-critical software, analytics, and AI to life and is the company behind Astro, the industry-leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow®. Astro accelerates building reliable data products that unlock insights, unleash AI value, and power data-driven applications. Trusted by more than 900 of the world’s leading enterprises, Astronomer lets businesses do more with their data. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.
Apache® and Apache Airflow® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Media Contact: Taylor Jones press@astronomer.io
