# Mastra Open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents and workflows. Ships agents, workflows, RAG, evals, and a managed Cloud for deployment and observability. ## About Mastra Mastra is a TypeScript-first agent framework from the team behind Gatsby. It gives developers a clean set of primitives (agents, workflows, tools, RAG, evals, memory) and a CLI that scaffolds, runs, and deploys a project locally. The framework is Apache 2.0, runs anywhere Node runs, and deploys to Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, or Mastra Cloud with one command. It is one of the best-engineered options for teams who want to write agent code in TypeScript and own the implementation. Sistava aims somewhere else entirely: not a framework for engineers, but a hiring experience for founders. You do not write the agent; you pick an AI Employee and put them to work. ## Platform details - Pricing: Framework is free and open source (Apache 2.0). Mastra Cloud: Free with 100K observability events and 24 CPU hours, Growing Teams $250/mo with 1M events and 250 CPU hours, custom for scale. - Founded: 2024, San Francisco - Funding: Approx $35M to $40M raised, including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, Gradient, basecase. Team of around 26 (Mar 2026), many ex-Gatsby. - Last reviewed: 2026-05-31 ## Official website - [Visit Mastra](https://mastra.ai) ## What is Mastra and who is it for? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents and workflows. You install it with npm, run a CLI to scaffold a project, and write your agents, tools, memory, and evals in TypeScript. It is squarely aimed at developers who like Next.js, ts-node, and Vercel and want the same ergonomics for AI code. Sistava is aimed at founders who never want to open VS Code in the first place. The team comes from Gatsby, one of the most successful JavaScript frameworks of the last decade. That heritage shows up in the developer experience: the CLI is fast, the docs are clean, the types are good, and the local dev loop feels familiar. For an engineer, Mastra is the most pleasant agent framework in the JavaScript ecosystem right now. The catch is that it is still a framework. You write the agent. You design the prompt. You wire the tools. You decide where it runs. Sistava ships the agent and runs it for you. ## How much does Mastra cost? The framework itself is free and open source under Apache 2.0. You can use it, modify it, fork it, and ship commercial products on top of it without paying Mastra anything. That is a real advantage for engineering teams that want long-term control of their stack. Mastra Cloud is the managed deployment service. The free tier gives 100K observability events, 24 CPU hours per month, and 15 days of retention, which is enough for a side project or a serious prototype. The Growing Teams plan is $250 per month with 1M events, 250 CPU hours, and 6 months of retention. Custom plans cover scale. LLM tokens are billed separately by your provider. Compared to Sistava, that adds up to three potential bills (Cloud, LLMs, your own infra) versus one bundled subscription. For an engineering org with finance approval, the trade-off is fine. For a solo founder watching a single credit card, the math is harder. ## When does Mastra beat a managed AI Employee? Mastra beats a managed employee when the agent IS the product. If you are building a SaaS feature, an in-product copilot, or a custom agent that needs to live inside your own application, Mastra gives you the primitives without the opinionation. You shape the agent to match your product, not the other way around. It also beats a managed employee when you need full ownership of the code, the data path, and the deployment target. Self-hosting on your own Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare account keeps everything inside your existing infra and compliance perimeter. Sistava is the opposite: hosted, opinionated, fast. For an engineering-heavy team that already runs Node services in production, Mastra slots into the existing toolchain. Adding another framework is cheap; adding another vendor is expensive. ## Where does Mastra fall short for a non-technical founder? Mastra assumes you write TypeScript. Everything starts at the CLI: scaffolding, running locally, defining agents, wiring tools, deploying, observing. A founder who cannot read TypeScript cannot use Mastra directly. Sistava is built for the same founder to hire an employee in five minutes without writing any code. The operating layer is missing by design. Mastra gives you memory and workflows; it does not give you a task board, a sprint, a mailbox, a drive, billing controls, or a status dashboard for a non-engineer to see what the agent did this week. Those concerns belong to the application you build on top, and most founders cannot afford to build that application. Finally, multi-tenant SaaS plumbing (tenancy, isolation, per-user credits, plan gating, auth, billing webhooks) is on you. Sistava ships all of it. For a one-person company, that gap is the difference between launching this month and launching next year. Honest take: Mastra is excellent for engineers and not designed for non-engineers. Sistava is the inverse. ## How does Mastra compare on production operations? Mastra Cloud is in public beta and adds the operational layer you would otherwise build yourself: zero-config deploys, GitHub integration, atomic deployments, REST endpoints for your agents and workflows, and observability for traces, tokens, and runs. For a Mastra-native team, it is the obvious place to ship. What you still own is monitoring at the human level. Who is on call when an agent loops? What dashboard tells the operations lead which agent missed a SLA today? What inbox surfaces a stuck task to a human? Sistava ships that as the product; Mastra leaves it to you. The framework also leaves long-term operations (Postgres, vector store, secret rotation, runbooks, incident response) to your platform team. That is the right answer for engineering orgs and the wrong answer for a single founder. ## Comparison - [Compare Mastra with Sistava](/en/compare/dev-frameworks/mastra) — See the two platforms side by side when you are ready to evaluate them.