Prefect

Prefect is a workflow orchestration and AI infrastructure platform for Python, founded by Jeremiah Lowin, former head of data engineering at Airbnb. The open source framework transforms any Python function into a monitored, retried, and observable workflow with a single decorator, eliminating the need to rewrite existing code. With over 22,700 GitHub stars and 12.9 million monthly downloads, Prefect has become one of the most widely adopted Python workflow tools, used in production by organizations including Cash App, WHOOP, NASA, Cisco, Meta, Ramp, Barstool Sports, Equinox, and Foursquare. The platform provides automatic retry logic, caching, task dependencies, parameterized flows, and a real-time dashboard for monitoring execution state, logs, and performance metrics. Prefect Cloud extends the open source engine with managed infrastructure, autoscaling workers, enterprise single sign-on, role-based access control, SOC 2 Type II compliance, and 99.99 percent uptime guarantees. WHOOP reported a 75 percent reduction in incidents and 40 percent improvement in mean time to recovery after adopting Prefect. Endpoint achieved a 73 percent cost reduction while tripling their production workload. In addition to workflow orchestration, Prefect has launched FastMCP, an open source project with over 25,800 GitHub stars and 86 million monthly downloads that provides the standard for building Model Context Protocol servers, powering approximately 70 percent of all MCP deployments. Prefect Horizon extends the platform into managed AI infrastructure, offering an MCP gateway, server registry, and governance controls for AI agents accessing enterprise systems. Both open source projects are released under the Apache 2.0 license with self-hosting support and zero vendor lock-in.