Editorial take
Why it stands out
Dagger is easiest to justify when delivery logic has become product engineering in its own right. If your build is one test command and one deploy command, it may be more platform than you need.
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Tool profile
Programmable delivery automation platform for building, testing, and shipping software across local, CI, and cloud environments.
Programmable CI/CD
Dagger is a programmable CI/CD and software-delivery platform built around containerized functions rather than another pile of proprietary YAML. Teams define delivery workflows in code, run them locally or in existing CI, reuse modules, and use Dagger Cloud for traces, module visibility, managed checks, and collaboration around workflow failures.
Dagger is particularly valuable for platform teams that want delivery logic to be portable, testable, and understandable outside a single CI vendor. It is not simply a hosted CI replacement for every team. The strongest use case is when build, test, release, and environment logic has become complicated enough that local reproducibility and workflow observability are worth adopting a new delivery abstraction.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Dagger is easiest to justify when delivery logic has become product engineering in its own right. If your build is one test command and one deploy command, it may be more platform than you need.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Dagger's Cloud pricing page lists an Individual Free plan, a Team early-access plan at $50/month after a 2-week trial, and Enterprise custom pricing. The Free plan includes 1 user and 1,000,000 monthly events; Team includes up to 10 users and 10,000,000 monthly events.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
