List of dbt features not supported on dbt cloud

Hi
we are currently running dbt on Airflow (actually Astronomer managed airflow) but are performing a proof of concept (POC) study to determine if we can migrate to dbt cloud. I would like to know if there is a list of dbt features that are not currently supported on dbt cloud? For example it is only by reading a thread on this forum that I discovered that env_var is not supported on dbt cloud, which will entail quite a significant rework of our models.
Many thanks

As an aside I also think it would be great if there were a dbt cloud Category on this forum

Sorry for the late reply here — I really thought about this and environment variables were the only thing that sprung to mind as a “missing” feature of dbt Cloud.

There will be differences in deploying a project via dbt Cloud versus Airflow, but they aren’t really “features” per se. Things like:

  • Jobs in dbt Cloud are configured through a UI, whereas tasks in Airflow are defined in your code (as far as I know)
  • You can chain together complex workflows in Airflow, whereas dbt Cloud is purpose-built for running dbt jobs only.

In exchange though, you get a ton of things that make running dbt jobs much nicer, like:

  • Access to the IDE, which might be a nicer development experience for team members
  • Automatically generate documentation for your project, in a way that members of your account can access securely (with lots of read only accounts)
  • Run your project automatically on pull requests

By the way, I’m going to unlist this topic — we’re trying to use Discourse for more long-form discussions, and “How to” posts, particularly those around dbt Core. Check out more details here.

Happy to continue the discussion on dbt Slack in the #dbt-cloud channel

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