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What's the Difference Between Amazon MWAA and AWS Step Functions?

Compare Amazon MWAA and AWS Step Functions side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Amazon MWAA
AWS Step Functions
Category

Application Integration, Workflow Orchestration

Application Integration, Workflow orchestration
Description

Managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow to set up and operate data pipelines in the cloud.

Visual workflows for distributed applications
Best for
  • Data pipeline orchestration
  • ETL workflows
  • ML pipelines
  • Batch processing coordination
  • Workflow orchestration
  • Data processing pipelines
  • ML pipelines
  • IT automation
  • Microservices coordination
Key features
  • Apache Airflow compatible
  • Auto scaling workers
  • Built-in security
  • CloudWatch integration
  • Custom plugins
  • Visual Workflow Studio
  • Standard & Express workflows
  • Error handling
  • Parallel execution
  • 200+ AWS service integrations
Pricing model

Pay per environment hour + worker hours

Pay per state transition
Free tier

No

Yes
Expert take

“MWAA runs Apache Airflow without managing the scheduler, webserver, or workers. Use it when your team already has Airflow DAGs and wants to avoid cluster operations.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Standard workflows run up to a year with exactly-once execution and are ideal for long-running orchestrations. Express workflows handle high-volume, short-duration event processing at a lower cost with at-least-once semantics. Use Workflow Studio to build visually before writing ASL JSON.”
— Gary McLean, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon MWAA »

Learn more about AWS Step Functions »

When to use Amazon MWAA or AWS Step Functions

Use Amazon MWAA when:

  • Data pipeline orchestration
  • ETL workflows
  • ML pipelines
  • Batch processing coordination

Learn more about Amazon MWAA »

Use AWS Step Functions when:

  • Workflow orchestration
  • Data processing pipelines
  • ML pipelines
  • IT automation
  • Microservices coordination

Learn more about AWS Step Functions »

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