Team prefers Temporal over Prefect and Airflow for orchestration → Temporal
“Temporal is amazing, it feels much better than previous orchestrators I used like Prefect or Airflow”
One person says they left Prefect; what else pushes users away, and what its category peers report
Friction holds 30 sourced reports about Prefect (prefect.io) from 72 public source threads (as of 2026-10-15); only 1 of them says the author left. This page shows that report, what its users say pushes them away, and the problem profile of Airbyte.
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Where Prefect users say they went
Switching reports that name a destination. A count is the number of reports naming it, not a market share: Friction only holds what people say in public.
| Named alternative | Reports naming it | Newest report |
|---|---|---|
| Temporal | 1 | 2026 |
| Luigi | 1 | 2021 |
The reports of leaving
What pushes people away from Prefect
The most-reported open problems, worst severity first. Each links to the item with its source.
A null byte causes the event persister to drop an entire batch · Reliability & bugs · Causes churn
“one event with a null byte (`\x00`) in its name, a resource label, or a payload string makes the event persister drop every event flushed”
Mapped tasks run multiple times on GKE Autopilot · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work · 3 people
“Data skew, because downstream tasks re-process the same data input and causes issue”
Agent intermittently fails to fetch runs from Prefect Cloud after upgrade · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work · 2 people
“Occasionally, flows crash with a connection-related exception that seems to originate from h2”
Prefect 3 server loops time out on slow database calls · Performance · Blocks work
“We've deployed the same flows in prefect 2.19 and there were no issues”
Task timeout leaves dbt work running during retries · Reliability & bugs · Annoyance
“two generations of dbt work can then race against the same relations”
Other data pipelines tools on Friction, and what their users struggle with
Switching trades one set of problems for another. The same evidence, for each tool Friction covers in this category:
Airbyte
23 reports · 71 source threads · most-discussed area: Reliability & bugs
Counts and reports reflect people who post in public (developers and technical buyers are over-represented). A tool with fewer reports is not a better tool; it may only be discussed less. How the data is built.