Couler vs Airflow: What are the differences?

What is Couler? Unified interface for constructing and managing workflows on different workflow engines. It aims to provide a unified interface for constructing and managing workflows on different workflow engines, such as Argo Workflows, Tekton Pipelines, and Apache Airflow.

What is Airflow? A platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines, by Airbnb. Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.

Couler and Airflow can be primarily classified as "Workflow Manager" tools.

Some of the features offered by Couler are:

• Unified interface and imperative programming style for defining workflows with automatic construction of directed acyclic graph (DAG)
• Extensible to support various workflow engines
• Reusable steps for tasks such as distributed training of machine learning models

On the other hand, Airflow provides the following key features:

• Dynamic: Airflow pipelines are configuration as code (Python), allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writting code that instantiate pipelines dynamically.
• Extensible: Easily define your own operators, executors and extend the library so that it fits the level of abstraction that suits your environment.
• Elegant: Airflow pipelines are lean and explicit. Parameterizing your scripts is built in the core of Airflow using powerful Jinja templating engine.

Airflow is an open source tool with 18.1K GitHub stars and 7.04K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Airflow's open source repository on GitHub.