Lakeflow Designer is part of Lakeflow, which will now be generally available. Lakeflow has three modules — Lakeflow Connect, Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines, and Lakeflow Jobs. Designer is integrated within Declarative Pipelines.
United in purpose, divided in approach
Lakeflow Designer, despite being very similar to rival Snowflake’s Openflow, differs in its approach, analysts say.
“Lakeflow and OpenFlow reflect two philosophies: Databricks integrates data engineering into a Spark-native, open orchestration fabric, while Snowflake’s OpenFlow offers declarative workflow control with deep Snowflake-native semantics. One favors flexibility and openness; the other favors consolidation and simplicity,” Ni said.
Both the offerings also differ in maturity, ISG’s Aslett said. While Snowflake’s OpenFlow is relatively new, Lakeflow has matured in functionality over the years, with Designer being its latest tool. “The Connect capabilities were acquired along with Arcion in 2023. Declarative pipelines functionality is the evolution of DLT (Delta Live Tables), and Jobs is the evolution of Databricks Workflows,” Aslett added.
Separately, Databricks also released another pro-code integrated development environment (IDE) for data engineers, which unifies the data engineer’s full pipeline lifecycle — code, DAGs, sample data, and debugging — all in one integrated workspace.
Releasing Lakeflow Designer and the new IDE together is a strategic play, according to Ni, as the lakehouse provider is targeting both ends of the pipeline maturity curve — low-code to move fast and the full IDE to scale and maintain pipelines.
