Airflow gives you control. And responsibility. And maintenance. And pain.

Airflow gives you a blank canvas to schedule and manage workflows—if you’re ready to code, configure, and maintain it all yourself. But orchestration alone isn’t enough for modern data teams. Ascend empowers teams to ingest, transform, and deliver data with intelligent orchestration, built-in automation, and deep observability—no patchwork required.

A Quick Look

Capabilities
Ascend
dbt
Orchestration
Native, intelligent orchestration—no DAGs to manage 
Highly customizable DAG-based orchestration 
Pipeline Coverage
Ingest → Transform → Deliver in one platform
Just orchestration—no ingest, transform, or delivery 
Automation
Event-driven, rule-based automation built in
Automation = what you write in Python 
Observability
Built-in lineage, alerts, and monitoring
Bring your own monitoring and logging stack 
Developer Experience 
Full-code, low-code, and AI-native workflows 
Code-only, no UI or AI tooling 
Scalability
Elastic scaling without rearchitecting 
Scaling = scaling your infra team 
Performance Optimization
Smart Tables reduce reprocessing + cost 
No native optimization—every task runs as written 
Where Airflow Shines
Apache Airflow has become the default orchestrator for data teams—and for good reason. It’s flexible, open-source, and battle-tested.
Highly customizable

You can build just about any workflow logic you can imagine—if you’re willing to write the code.
Massive community + plugin ecosystem

With wide adoption across industries, there’s a plugin, Stack Overflow thread, or open-source tool for almost every edge case.
Good for complex, multi-step workflows

For teams with sophisticated orchestration needs, Airflow offers fine-grained control—if you're ready to manage it all yourself.

It’s a solid choice for teams that have the time, skillset, and infrastructure to maintain it. But as needs evolve and data stacks grow, Airflow starts to feel like a project unto itself and quickly becomes a bottleneck. 

Where Airflow Falls Short
Airflow gives you orchestration—but that’s it. Everything else? You’re building it yourself.
No ingestion, no transformation, no delivery

Airflow isn’t a data platform. You still need to wire up external tools for every other part of the pipeline.

Manual setup, deployment, and maintenance

Expect to spend serious time configuring environments, writing DAGs, managing retries, and troubleshooting failures.

Observability is bolt-on, not built-in

Want to know why something failed or how long it took? Better set up your own logging, alerting, and dashboards.

Automation is limited to what you write

No rule-based logic. No event-driven triggers. Just Python and cron schedules.

Scaling = scaling your infrastructure team

Airflow doesn’t auto-optimize or auto-scale. It doesn’t understand your data. That’s on you.

Airflow isn’t broken—it’s just not enough anymore. Data teams need more than orchestration. They need intelligence and automation so they can build faster, safely, and at scale.

Included in Every Plan

Every Ascend plan includes full access to the platform — no feature gating, no user limits. Build, automate, and scale with confidence using the entire suite of AI-powered tools.

Data Ingestion
Say goodbye to fragile handoffs and brittle ingest jobs.

Whether you’re moving data from lakes, warehouses, databases, APIs, or legacy systems, Ascend makes it easy. Flexible connectors and dynamic schema handling ensure your pipelines stay reliable as systems evolve.

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Ascend UI - Data Ingestion
Transformation
Transform Data with Speed at Scale

Ascend automates orchestration using rich metadata and event-driven triggers—so pipelines run only when needed, and custom logic is easy to build in.

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Ascend UI - Transformation
Orchestration
Orchestration That Writes Itself

Monitor pipeline performance, trace lineage end-to-end, and debug faster with real-time, metadata-powered insights.

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Ascend UI - Automation & Orchestration
Observability
See Everything. Fix Anything.

Run faster, spend less—Ascend uses metadata and fingerprinting to cut unnecessary compute without sacrificing performance.

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Ascend UI - Deployment Dashboard
DataOps
Built-In DataOps for Modern Teams

From Git-backed workflows to access controls and secure deployment environments, Ascend simplifies operational excellence with native support for modern DevOps practices.

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Ascend UI - CI/CD
Say Goodbye to Fragile Handoffs and Brittle Ingest Jobs

Whether you’re moving data from lakes, warehouses, databases, APIs, or legacy systems, Ascend makes it easy. Flexible connectors and dynamic schema handling ensure your pipelines stay reliable as systems evolve.

Learn More
Ascend UI - Data Ingestion
Transform Data
with Speed at Scale

From SQL to Python, declarative to imperative, Ascend supports multiple authoring modes — all integrated with version control and modular pipeline design. Build fast, iterate safely.

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Ascend UI - Transformation
Orchestration
that Writes Itself

Ascend’s DataAware engine lets you design intelligent workflows using the metadata you already have — turning your designs into powerful automation. Ascend's Smart Tables process data up to 100x faster.

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Ascend UI - Automation & Orchestration
See Everything.
Fix Anything.

From real-time monitoring to full lineage and change tracking, Ascend gives you deep visibility into your data flows — so you can spot issues fast and optimize with confidence.

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Built-In DataOps
for Modern Teams

From Git-backed workflows to access controls and secure deployment environments, Ascend simplifies operational excellence with native support for modern DataOps best practices.

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Ascend UI - CI/CD
Intelligence at the Core

Ascend's Intelligence Core combines metadata, automation, and AI in a layered architecture that empowers teams to build pipelines 7x faster and cut processing costs by 83%.

Ascend UI - Data Pipeline Deployment Dashboard
01

Unified Metadata Collection

Ascend tracks data, code, and user actions in a unified metadata layer — powering automation, observability, and auditability through the entire data lifecycle.

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Ascend UI - Automation Forms

DataAware™ Automation Engine

Ascend’s automation engine uses rich metadata to orchestrate pipelines — managing dependencies, triggering tasks, and supporting custom event-driven workflows.

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Ascend Agentic Engineering experience in the UI

Integrated AI Agents

Let AI do the tedious parts of data engineering — Ascend’s context-aware agents suggest code, explain logic, generate docs, and even automate steps on your behalf.

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Acend UI - Data Pipeline Deployment DashboardAscend UI - AutomationsAscend UI - Agentic Data Engineering Experience

Airflow gave data teams a way to orchestrate.
But that’s all it ever promised. 

Ascend goes further—ingesting, transforming, orchestrating, and optimizing your data in one unified platform. No DAG wrangling. No plugin pileup. Just pipelines that run smarter, scale faster, and require way less babysitting.

Smarter data engineering starts here.

Upto
700%
Boost in team productivity

Free Up Analytics and Data Engineering Time​

Testimonial grid.