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.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon MWAA
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AWS Step Functions
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Category
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Application Integration, Workflow Orchestration |
Application Integration, Workflow orchestration |
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Description
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Managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow to set up and operate data pipelines in the cloud. |
Visual workflows for distributed applications |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per environment hour + worker hours |
Pay per state transition |
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Free tier
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No |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“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.” |
“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.” |
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Product page
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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
Next steps with AWS for Application Integration
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