At a glance
AKHQ scores 57 out of 90 on this page's five weighted criteria: it takes its best score on Cost as teams grow (10 out of 10) and its lowest on Support and maintenance (5 out of 10). The rubric is weighted: Support and maintenance counts three times, Access control and audit counts three times, and Cost as teams grow, Deployment footprint and Multi-cluster reach count once. Licence cost: $0, Apache 2.0. The other options, in the order this page lists them: Kpow 82, Kafbat UI 60, Redpanda Console 55, Lenses 52, Kafdrop 27, each out of 90. Listed first because it is our product. Every per-criterion score is unadjusted and the same rubric is applied to every option; the weights are this page's own stated view of what decides the question.
Key takeaways
- AKHQ is the most complete free Kafka UI available, covering multi-cluster management, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, consumer group monitoring, ACL management, and LDAP/OIDC authentication in a single self-hosted tool.
- Memory behaviour under high-throughput message tailing or large consumer group counts is a documented operational risk, with multiple out-of-memory reports at heap sizes up to 14 GB and no published fix.
- The authentication layer is more mature than most free alternatives, but reaching fine-grained multi-cluster RBAC required Michelin to contribute code directly to the project; audit logging exists, is opt-in, and writes to a Kafka topic the operator nominates rather than to any view inside the product.
- Reddit practitioners consistently frame AKHQ as a starting point for small teams, with a recurring pattern of switching to commercial tooling once teams feel pain around auditability, self-service workflows, or scale.
- AKHQ has data masking, but it is configured globally rather than per role, and it has no JMX metrics visualisation, no alerting, and no partition or replica management from the UI.
- For teams that need enterprise RBAC, masking that varies by role, an audit trail readable in the product, or commercially backed support, Kpow is worth evaluating as an alternative.
Kpow live demo
Test the operational trade-offs in a live Kafka UI
An AKHQ review is only the start of an evaluation. Open Kpow and try the shared workflows your platform team will need every day.
Explore data inspection, consumer operations, and governed access in one environment.
Try the Kpow demoWhat is AKHQ?
AKHQ (formerly KafkaHQ) is an open-source Kafka management UI maintained by Ludovic Dehon (tchiotludo) under the Apache 2.0 licence. The project is hosted at https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq. It is self-hosted, JVM-based, and built on Micronaut.
A single AKHQ deployment connects to one or more Kafka clusters and exposes topic browsing, live message tailing, message production, consumer group monitoring, Schema Registry management, Kafka Connect management, ACL management, and role-based access control with LDAP and OIDC integration. AWS MSK IAM authentication is also supported.
AKHQ has no commercial edition, no hosted SaaS version, and no paid support tier. All functionality is available in the open-source release. Enterprise users including Michelin and La Redoute have contributed features directly to the project.
AKHQ review
Functionalities
AKHQ covers a broad surface area for a free tool. Named reviewers credit it with multi-cluster management, message browsing, live tailing, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ACL management, and RBAC in a single deployment. [German Osin, Medium / Towards Data Science, 2 Sep 2021]
The functional ceiling appears in a consistent set of areas. AKHQ does not support dynamic topic configuration, partition increase, replica change, Kafka Streams topology visualisation, or JMX metrics visualisation. [German Osin, same source; Zeenia Gupta, Platformatory blog, 5 Sep 2024] Protobuf support is partial: the schema registry integration is limited to the deserialiser side, and at least one user reports complete deserialization failure when using Protobuf with Apicurio Registry even when the descriptor-file flow works. [Zeenia Gupta, Platformatory blog, 5 Sep 2024; GitHub issue #1185] A related Avro bug causes AKHQ to fall back to raw message output when it cannot match a schema ID, leaving messages unparsed in the UI. [GitHub issue #1918, 2024]
ksqlDB integration is listed in AKHQ’s configuration options but is effectively non-functional against Confluent Cloud endpoints. Configuring a Confluent ksqlDB endpoint produces a null pointer exception on the HTTP client (Cannot invoke io.vertx.core.http.HttpClientRequest.response(...) because request is null). [sbourell, GitHub issue #1954, 24 Sep 2024] A separate discussion thread reports that ksqlDB does not appear in the menus at all despite correct configuration. [GitHub Discussion #1486]
There is also a production workflow friction point: the message production dialog closes after each message, requiring the operator to reopen it and refill all fields when producing multiple messages in sequence. [xarx00, GitHub Discussion #805, Sep 2021]
Data masking is present, and the constraint is its scope rather than its absence. akhq.security.data-masking takes four modes - regex, the default, plus json_show_by_default, json_mask_by_default, and none - and the filters live in application YAML keyed on topic and field path, so what is hidden does not vary by who is looking. [AKHQ configuration reference, 2026] Only one filter per topic is supported, so where RecordNameStrategy places several record types on one topic, any record carrying that field path is masked. For a team handling PII or operating under HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR requirements, the question is whether a global policy satisfies the requirement, not whether masking exists.
AKHQ also has no built-in support for dead-letter queue (DLT) retry patterns or inline message payload correction. These capabilities require separate tooling, and the gap has driven some teams toward purpose-built event-streaming platforms that handle error recovery alongside broker management. [r/apachekafka, GitHub: i_built_a_spring_boot_starter_for_kafka_message, 2025]
Deployment and operations
Docker Compose and Helm installation are two of the most consistently praised aspects of AKHQ. Getting a full local stack including Kafka, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and AKHQ running requires a single docker compose pull followed by docker compose up, giving access to everything at localhost:8080. [AKHQ docs, akhq.io/docs/] Connections, users, groups, and schema registry links are defined in YAML and deployed via Helm, making the configuration GitOps-friendly. [Factor House, same URL above, 2026] Community feedback echoes this: one practitioner on r/apachekafka described it as “open source, can be installed on prem using their docker image, and it’s very lightweight.” [Drazul_, r/apachekafka, 2025]
AKHQ 0.24.0 has been successfully deployed on Red Hat OpenShift 4 using Helm with Kafka 3.3.1; Rogerio Santos at Red Hat describes it as “an excellent complement to AMQ streams.” [Rogerio Santos, Red Hat Developer, 26 Jul 2023]
The operational risk is memory. A documented memory pattern on AWS ECS at 4 GB RAM shows “an ascending stair shape” with little or no deallocation between scans. [arnaud-ly, GitHub issue #1141, 5 Jul 2022] High-throughput topic tailing triggers a Direct buffer memory out-of-memory error even at 14 GB heap, which points to a missing backpressure mechanism rather than a simple heap sizing problem. [MichalPopielski, GitHub issue #1206, 13 Sep 2022] Neither issue has a published resolution. For clusters with many consumer groups, the AKHQ documentation itself recommends enabling HIDE_EMPTY and setting skip-consumer-groups: true as a workaround to keep startup responsive. [AKHQ docs, referenced in GitHub issue #271]
Security scan failures have also been reported against the official Docker image at version 0.24.0, related to vulnerabilities in bundled Java libraries. [GitHub issue #1771]
Access control and security
AKHQ supports LDAP, OIDC, HTTP basic authentication, and external role and attribute claim mapping. MSK IAM support was contributed and merged. [Zeenia Gupta, Platformatory blog, 5 Sep 2024; GitHub issue #810] This is a broader authentication story than most free Kafka UIs offer, and it is one of the primary reasons practitioners choose AKHQ over Kafdrop.
The limits become apparent under enterprise conditions. Michelin built their own resource-level RBAC layer on top of AKHQ because the default authorisation mechanisms were not granular enough for multi-cluster, multi-team use. Their contribution modified “all AKHQ features and authorization mechanisms (LDAP, OIDC, external claims)” and introduced an AKHQSecured annotation for fine-grained control. [Alexis Souquiere, Michelin engineering blog, 5 Mar 2024] An internal survey at Michelin in 2023 “revealed widespread dissatisfaction” with small issues that accumulated over time, and the team considered building an alternative before choosing to contribute instead. [Alexis Souquiere, same source]
Active auth bugs affect current releases. An Okta OIDC redirect loop sends authenticated users back to /ui/login when they click a topic linked to a restricted consumer group, affecting AKHQ 0.25.1. [ndemyanchuk-booking, GitHub issue #2131, 25 Mar 2025] A separate regression sends users to the login page despite a 200 OK on the initial login request. [GitHub issue #2055] LDAPS configuration also carries documented friction. [GitHub issues #887, #1041]
Audit logging is present, opt-in, and has no view inside the product. akhq.audit takes enabled, cluster-id, and topic-name, and audit events are produced to the Kafka topic the operator nominates; release 0.28.0 widened coverage to record produce, record delete, and empty topic. [AKHQ configuration reference, 2026; AKHQ 0.28.0 release notes, PR #3110, Jul 2026] So the record of who reset a consumer offset or produced a message does exist, and reading it is work the team does elsewhere - a log shipper, a consumer, or whatever already reads Kafka topics - rather than a screen in AKHQ. For any team operating under change-management or compliance requirements, that pipeline is the cost to plan for.
User interface
The UI is functional and covers its stated scope, but it is consistently described as less polished and less responsive than Conduktor or modern Kafbat. The structural complaints are recurring: search filters reset when navigating between views, and content reloads from the server rather than from a cached client-side state, which creates a sluggish experience when switching between topics or schemas. [xarx00, GitHub Discussion #805, Sep 2021] The maintainer acknowledged performance and navigation debt in the same thread, noting that schema registry caching would be a prerequisite for any direct topic-to-schema navigation improvement.
German Osin’s characterisation from 2021 remains consistent with more recent accounts: AKHQ “is not the most convenient” and users “will definitely need to allocate some time” to learn it. [German Osin, Medium / Towards Data Science, 2 Sep 2021] Comparison reviewers describe Kafbat’s UI as “more modern” than AKHQ’s. [Factor House, 2026] The Reddit community surfaces the same friction directly: one engineer summarised it as “you get what you pay for… since you pay nothing, you get a clunky UI/UX. It does its job, but leaves more to be desired (especially after you use Conduktor).” [roastedsun, r/apachekafka, 2025] A platform architect put it in practical terms: “if it’s a startup and you just want visibility and basic management I’d try Kafka UI or AKHQ first. If you’re feeling pain around ‘who changed what’ and ‘how do we let devs self-serve without blowing stuff up’ then look harder at Conduktor or Lenses.” [TellersTech, r/apachekafka, 2025]
On the positive side, a practitioner walkthrough from March 2026 frames AKHQ as “a control tower for the entire Kafka ecosystem,” removing the need to SSH into servers and run kafka shell scripts. [Naveen Mittal, Medium, 7 Mar 2026] Thoughtworks placed AKHQ in “Trial” status on their Technology Radar in 2022, citing topic browsing, Avro and Protobuf deserialization, and consumer group visibility as useful capabilities for teams working to understand data flows. [Thoughtworks Technology Radar, 29 Mar 2022] Day-to-day debugging tasks - message scanning, data discovery, and consumer group inspection - receive the most consistent praise from practitioners, and some larger engineering organisations run AKHQ alongside a commercial tool as a lightweight secondary viewer. [arcanumoid, r/apachekafka, 2025; r/apachekafka, urn8f3 thread, 2022]
Ecosystem
Schema Registry and Kafka Connect are well-supported and among the most cited reasons to choose AKHQ over lighter tools like Kafdrop. MSK IAM was added through a community contribution. Multi-cluster support is documented in production: Michelin uses AKHQ across on-premise factory clusters and cloud deployments to supervise topics, consumer groups, and connectors. [Alexis Souquiere, Michelin engineering blog, 5 Mar 2024] Rogerio Santos at Red Hat singles out multi-cluster support as a key advantage: “One of the features of AKHQ is its support for configuring multiple clusters, making it a convenient central GUI for managing multiple Kafka clusters.” [Red Hat Developer, 26 Jul 2023]
The ksqlDB gap is the notable exception. The integration exists in configuration and was listed as a 0.24.0 feature contributed by 30+ contributors, but it does not function reliably against Confluent Cloud endpoints, and at least two community threads report it being absent from the UI despite correct configuration. [sbourell, GitHub issue #1954, 2024; GitHub Discussion #1486; akhq.io LinkedIn post on the 0.24.0 release]
Customer support
AKHQ has no commercial support tier, no SLA, and no enterprise offering. The project is functionally a single-maintainer effort led by Ludovic Dehon, with major feature contributions from a small set of enterprise users. La Redoute’s distributed OSPO experience building an open-source Kafka product is documented; Michelin is a recognised core contributor. [La Redoute engineering blog, summarised via search result; Alexis Souquiere, Michelin engineering blog, 5 Mar 2024]
Open issues can wait months for a response. The memory leak reported in issue #1141 dates to July 2022 with no published fix or maintainer comment. The Confluent ksqlDB issue #1954 was labelled “wait for reply” with no visible maintainer response in the thread. Documentation covers the happy path well but is thin on production tuning guidance and auth edge cases, with HTTPS Schema Registry configuration appearing as a recurring community discussion topic. [GitHub Discussion #575]
Best for
AKHQ suits individual engineers and small platform teams that need real authentication (LDAP/OIDC), Schema Registry and Connect management, MSK IAM support, and multi-cluster visibility in one self-hosted tool with no licence fee. It sits alongside Kafbat UI and the free tiers of the commercial products in our roundup of the best free Kafka UI tools. It is a credible production choice for OpenShift shops running AMQ Streams, and for teams who want GitOps-friendly YAML configuration and a mature Helm chart. Engineers replacing ad hoc CLI workflows - SSH sessions and kafka shell scripts - will find AKHQ a meaningful step forward. Some larger organisations also run it as a lightweight secondary viewer alongside a commercial platform, using it for quick message browsing while relying on the commercial tool for access control and governance.
It stops being a sufficient fit when teams grow beyond roughly five engineers sharing a cluster, when compliance requirements mandate masking that varies by role or an audit trail somebody can read without building a pipeline for it, when operators need JMX metrics or alerting built into the UI, or when the cluster runs Confluent ksqlDB. Teams handling PII or operating in regulated industries should treat the global scope of the masking policy as the constraint, rather than its absence. The operational overhead of maintaining a web-based server has also pushed some engineers toward desktop-native Kafka clients that require no Docker daemon to run; tools like KafkIO and Swifka have emerged to serve that preference. [r/apachekafka, rkquik thread, 2025; r/apachekafka, rash5y thread, 2025]
AKHQ pricing
AKHQ carries no licence fee. It is open-source under the Apache 2.0 licence, with no paid edition, no hosted SaaS option, and no commercial support offering. The cost is the time it takes to run: we put that at about 6 engineer-hours a month across three clusters, or roughly $8,640 a year at $120 an hour, covering the heap tuning the memory reports below call for, the audit pipeline the product does not provide, and the masking policy kept in YAML. That is our estimate rather than a published figure, and it is the number to weigh against a licensed tool.
Pricing tiers
| Tier | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Open source | $0 licence; about $8,640 a year in engineer time for 3 clusters, our estimate | Full feature set; self-hosted only |
Free trial
No trial period applies. The full project is available at https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq with no feature restrictions or registration requirements.
AKHQ competitors and alternatives
AKHQ competes with a range of self-hosted and commercial Kafka management tools, from lightweight topic browsers like Kafdrop to full governance platforms like Kpow. The right fit depends on how much operational maturity, compliance capability, and support you need beyond what the open-source tier provides.
| Rank | Tool | Best for | Type | Key functionalities | Deployment and ops | Access control | User interface | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kpow (Factor House) | Teams needing enterprise RBAC, an accessible UI, and commercially backed support without per-seat pricing | Commercial | Topics, messages, Schema Registry, Connect, RBAC, MSK/GCP/Azure support | Stateless; Docker or Kubernetes; straightforward deployment | Advanced RBAC; SSO | WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, with a published VPAT; high performance at scale | $4,500 per cluster a year, 100 users included, so $13,500 a year for 3 clusters, plus about $2,880 a year in engineer time, about $16,380 all in on our estimate |
| 2 | Kafbat | Teams wanting an actively developed OSS alternative with a more modern UI | OSS (Apache 2.0) | Similar to AKHQ; actively maintained fork of the Provectus kafka-ui project | Docker, Helm | LDAP, OIDC | More modern than AKHQ | No licence fee (Apache 2.0); about $8,640 a year in engineer time for 3 clusters, our estimate |
| 3 | AKHQ | Small teams needing LDAP/OIDC, Schema Registry, Connect, and MSK IAM at zero cost | OSS (Apache 2.0) | Topics, messages, Schema Registry, Connect, consumer groups, ACLs, multi-cluster, MSK IAM | Docker Compose, Helm, GitOps YAML; JVM memory issues at scale | LDAP, OIDC, basic, external claims; opt-in audit to a Kafka topic | Functional; dated; filter state resets on navigation | No licence fee (Apache 2.0); about $8,640 a year in engineer time for 3 clusters, our estimate |
| 4 | Redpanda Console | Redpanda-native teams or those wanting a lightweight browser for any Kafka-compatible cluster | Source-available (BSL) / commercial | Topic browsing, consumer groups, Schema Registry; more limited Connect management | Docker, Kubernetes | None in the free build; SSO and RBAC need a Redpanda Enterprise licence | Clean, modern | No licence fee under the Business Source License (BSL), plus about $8,640 a year in engineer time for 3 deployments, our estimate; enterprise pricing on request |
| 5 | Lenses | Teams needing SQL-based data exploration and a developer experience layer across Kafka | Commercial | SQL over topics, data observability, developer portal | Self-hosted or SaaS | RBAC, SSO | Developer-focused; SQL interface prominent | Community has no licence fee for up to 5 users; Team from $4,000/year for up to 15 users; custom above that |
| 6 | Kafdrop | Lightweight topic browsing with minimal setup | OSS (Apache 2.0) | Topic browse, message view, consumer groups | Docker; minimal dependencies | None | Simple, read-focused | No licence fee (Apache 2.0); about $11,520 a year in engineer time for 3 deployments, our estimate |
| 7 | Conduktor | Multi-team enterprises needing data masking, field-level encryption, and audit logs | Commercial | Topics, Schema Registry, Connect, data masking, audit logs, ksqlDB, self-service workflows | Docker or Kubernetes; requires PostgreSQL; SaaS available | SSO, RBAC, audit logging; SAML on Enterprise tier | Polished, React-based | Community tier has no licence fee; Team from ~$1,200/seat/year, so $24,000 a year for 20 engineers |
For a broader comparison across all major Kafka UI tools, see the Factor House Kafka UI tools comparison.
Every option here is scored against this page's own criteria, from the evidence and sources this page cites, and the reason for each score sits under it. This page weights them: Cost as teams grow counts once, Deployment footprint counts once, Support and maintenance counts three times, Access control and audit counts three times and Multi-cluster reach counts once, for a total out of 90. Access control and audit and Support and maintenance count three times here, because in a regulated environment the decisive questions are who may act on a cluster and who is accountable when a dependency advisory lands. Cost as teams grow, deployment footprint and multi-cluster reach are real, but they are one-off decisions rather than standing exposure, so they count once. Kpow is a Factor House product and is listed first for that reason; its per-criterion scores are set the same way as every other option's and are not adjusted, and the weights above apply to every option alike.
Rank 1 Kpow
82 out of 90 Total
Listed first because it is our product. Every score below is unadjusted, and the weights this page applies to them are published above the cards.
- Cost a year, 3 clusters
- About $16,380, licence and run time
- Users
- 100 included per cluster
- Free tier
- $0 for 3 clusters and 10 users
- Cost as teams grow
- 7 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 9 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 9 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 10 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 9 out of 10
Why these scores for Kpow
- Cost as teams grow 7 out of 10
- This page’s table gives per-cluster pricing, and the Kpow pricing page has it from $4,500 per cluster with 100 users included, so $13,500 for the three clusters this page models, with RBAC, masking and audit held back from Community Edition. Our cost model adds 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 to run one stateless container, which is $2,880, for about $16,380 a year. The unlicensed OSS tools score higher on licence cost alone, and on total cost at this size.
- Deployment footprint 9 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Stateless, and the Kpow vs AKHQ comparison has one container configured by environment variables with no external database. Kafdrop scores higher.
- Support and maintenance 9 out of 10
- This page’s table gives commercially backed support, and the Kpow features page adds an Enterprise support SLA.
- Access control and audit 10 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Advanced RBAC and SSO, and the Kpow vs AKHQ comparison adds masking applied by role and audit logging in the product, all on Enterprise.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- This page’s table gives MSK/GCP/Azure support, and the Kpow multi-cluster page has up to 12 clusters per instance across distributions.
What it costs. Enterprise is $4,500 per cluster a year with up to 100 users included, so three clusters cost $13,500 a year however many engineers use them, and Community Edition is free for 3 clusters and 10 users. Add our modelled running cost of 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, about $2,880 a year, and three clusters come to about $16,380. AKHQ’s three clusters carry no licence and about $8,640 a year of engineer time on our estimate, so the free tool is the cheaper line while the masking policy, the audit pipeline and the heap stay yours to maintain, and the Kpow figure stops moving when the team grows because 100 users are included per cluster.
Where it beats AKHQ. Data masking is a server-side policy applied by role, where AKHQ applies one YAML filter per topic to every user, and the audit log is readable in the product rather than a Kafka topic you build a pipeline for. It runs as one stateless container configured by environment variables, with no external database, and Enterprise comes with a support SLA.
Where it falls short. It is not free past Community Edition, which covers 3 clusters and 10 users and leaves out RBAC, data masking, SSO and the audit log. Enterprise is licensed per cluster, where AKHQ costs nothing to license at any size, and one instance manages up to 12 clusters before you deploy another.
Staying patched. Kpow’s release notes name the CVEs each release remediates, and the 96.4 image built on 5 August 2026 bundles 311 dependencies of which one carries a high or critical advisory, none of them published before that release. That is not a claim to patch faster than a community project: Kpow’s own dependency remediation has run from 14 to 128 days, and the current image still ships CVE-2026-75595 in netty, a 9.1 critical public since 19 August 2026, unpatched. What a licence buys here is not a different deployment model, because Kpow is self-hosted too. It is a company contracted to ship the fix. Every dependency figure on this page was read on 24 September 2026 from the published artefacts and from nvd.nist.gov.
Compare Kpow vs AKHQKpow vs Kafbat UIKpow vs KafdropKpow vs Lenses.ioKpow vs Redpanda Console
Rank 2 Kafbat UI
60 out of 90 Total
- Licence cost
- $0, Apache 2.0
- Our TCO estimate
- About $8,640 a year
- Latest release
- v1.5.0, April 2026
- Cost as teams grow
- 10 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 8 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 5 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 6 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 9 out of 10
Why these scores for Kafbat UI
- Cost as teams grow 10 out of 10
- This page’s table gives no licence and OSS Apache 2.0, and the Kadeck vs Kafbat UI comparison adds no seat or cluster cap. The card shows our run-cost estimate of about $8,640 a year at 6 engineer-hours a month and $120 an hour.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Docker and Helm, the Kadeck vs Kafbat UI comparison has a stateless container, and the Kafbat UI review records dynamic config failing on Kubernetes.
- Support and maintenance 5 out of 10
- This page’s table gives actively maintained, the AKHQ vs Kafbat UI comparison has v1.5.0 in April 2026 with commits in August 2026, and the Kpow vs Kafbat UI comparison has GitHub issues or unpriced services and no SLA.
- Access control and audit 6 out of 10
- This page’s table gives LDAP and OIDC, the AKHQ vs Kafbat UI comparison has permissions over eight resource types, and the Kpow vs Kafbat UI comparison has server-side REMOVE, REPLACE and MASK with audit to a Kafka topic and no per-role masking.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- The Conduktor vs Kafbat UI comparison makes another cluster another config entry, with no cap.
What it costs. Nothing to licence, under Apache 2.0 with no seat or cluster cap, and paid help is professional services quoted on request rather than a listed tier, so there is no published price and no SLA to hold anyone to. Running it is the cost: about 6 engineer-hours a month across three clusters, on the audit topic, the masking policies and the cluster configuration it cannot take from its own interface, which is 72 hours or about $8,640 a year. Our estimate, not a vendor price, for the same three clusters at $120 an engineer-hour. Kpow’s three clusters are about $16,380 on the same model, $13,500 of published licence and $2,880 of run time.
Where it beats AKHQ. The access model is finer: permissions are scoped to eight resource types, and masking runs server-side with REMOVE, REPLACE and MASK policies set per cluster. This page’s own table calls its interface more modern than AKHQ’s, and releases are still landing, with v1.5.0 in April 2026.
Where it falls short. Masking still does not vary by role, the audit level defaults to ALTER_ONLY so reads go unrecorded, and there is no audit view in the product. Adding clusters from the UI fails on Kubernetes, so cluster changes go back into configuration and a restart, the same place AKHQ keeps them.
Staying patched. Kafbat UI released v1.5.0 in April 2026 and has not shipped since. In the 157 days since, at least 20 high or critical advisories have been published against libraries that release bundles, including the same netty critical CVE-2026-75595 that the current Kpow image carries. Only 150 of its 266 bundled jars resolved to a Maven coordinate, so that count is a floor and the state of the release itself is unmeasured. Kafbat does publish a security policy, which AKHQ and Kafdrop do not, and the one CVE filed against its own code, CVE-2025-49127, was already fixed in the release that preceded the advisory. Six releases in two years.
Compare Kpow vs Kafbat UIAKHQ vs Kafbat UIConduktor vs Kafbat UIKafbat UI review
Rank 3 AKHQ
57 out of 90 Total
- Licence cost
- $0, Apache 2.0
- Our TCO estimate
- About $8,640 a year
- Latest release
- 0.28.0, July 2026
- Cost as teams grow
- 10 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 8 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 5 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 5 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 9 out of 10
Why these scores for AKHQ
- Cost as teams grow 10 out of 10
- This page gives no licence under Apache 2.0, no paid edition and no feature restrictions. The card shows our own run-cost estimate of about $8,640 a year for three clusters at 6 engineer-hours a month and $120 an hour.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- This page praises Docker Compose and Helm on one JVM service, docked for the memory reports at 4 GB and 14 GB heap with no published fix.
- Support and maintenance 5 out of 10
- This page has a single primary maintainer, no SLA and issues that wait months, and the Kpow vs AKHQ comparison gives support as GitHub issues and the community.
- Access control and audit 5 out of 10
- This page gives LDAP, OIDC, basic and claim mapping, resource-level RBAC only via Michelin’s contribution, masking global per topic, and audit opt-in to a Kafka topic with no view.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- This page has one deployment connecting to one or more clusters, MSK IAM supported, and Michelin running it across factory and cloud clusters.
What it costs. Nothing to licence. The Apache 2.0 release is the whole product: no paid edition, no hosted option, nothing held back behind a tier, and no registration to download it. The cost lands in the heap you size and watch and the pipeline you build to read the audit topic. We put that at about 6 engineer-hours a month across three clusters, 72 hours a year, or about $8,640. Our estimate, not a vendor price, for the same three clusters at $120 an engineer-hour. The same three clusters on Kpow are about $16,380 a year on the same model, $13,500 of published licence and $2,880 of run time, with the masking and the audit trail already built.
Where it wins. Nothing is held back for a paid tier, so LDAP and OIDC with claim mapping, MSK IAM, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect and many clusters from one deployment all come free, and the YAML-under-Helm configuration fits a GitOps workflow.
Where it falls short. Masking is one filter per topic for every user, audit events land in a Kafka topic you have to read with your own tooling, the heap growth reports from 2022 still have no published fix, and support is one maintainer and the issue tracker.
Staying patched. AKHQ has no CVE filed against its own code, and that is the wrong number to plan against. Release 0.28.0, cut on 6 August 2026, bundles 270 libraries and 18 of them carry a high or critical advisory. Sixteen were already public, with fixed versions already on Maven Central, on the day it shipped, and five are netty advisories Kpow had remediated three weeks earlier in 96.2: CVE-2026-44249, CVE-2026-45416, CVE-2026-45674, CVE-2026-47691 and CVE-2026-50010. The oldest has been open 108 days. That is exposure and remediation latency rather than a working attack, and every figure resolves against the published jar and nvd.nist.gov. Four releases in two years, and no security policy at any path GitHub reads.
Compare Kpow vs AKHQAKHQ vs Kafbat UIAKHQ vs KafdropAKHQ vs LensesAKHQ vs Redpanda Console
Rank 4 Redpanda Console
redpanda.com
55 out of 90 Total
- Licence cost
- $0 to run, Business Source License
- Our TCO estimate
- About $8,640 a year
- Reach
- One broker cluster per deployment
- Cost as teams grow
- 6 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 8 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 7 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 6 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 2 out of 10
Why these scores for Redpanda Console
- Cost as teams grow 6 out of 10
- This page’s table has no licence fee under BSL with enterprise pricing on request, and the Kpow vs Redpanda Console comparison has governance needing an unpublished Redpanda Enterprise licence. The card shows our run-cost estimate of about $8,640 a year at 6 engineer-hours a month and $120 an hour.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Docker and Kubernetes, and the Kadeck vs Redpanda Console comparison has it holding no state, plus an external Schema Registry.
- Support and maintenance 7 out of 10
- The Kafbat UI vs Redpanda Console comparison has v3.11.0 on 25 August 2026, and the AKHQ vs Redpanda Console comparison puts Redpanda under contract where a licence is held.
- Access control and audit 6 out of 10
- This page’s table has none of it in the free build, and the AKHQ vs Redpanda Console comparison has OIDC SSO and RBAC licence-gated with audit a platform capability.
- Multi-cluster reach 2 out of 10
- The AKHQ vs Redpanda Console and Kafdrop vs Redpanda Console comparisons both give one broker cluster per deployment at any price.
What it costs. The community build costs nothing to run but ships under the Business Source License rather than Apache 2.0, so it is a licence review rather than a purchase. Three environments mean three Consoles, which we put at about 6 engineer-hours a month, 72 hours a year, or about $8,640. Our estimate, not a vendor price, for the same three clusters at $120 an engineer-hour. Turning on authentication adds a Redpanda Enterprise licence at a price that is not published, so the real figure is higher than that and cannot be quoted. Kpow’s three clusters are about $16,380 a year on the same model, $13,500 of published licence and $2,880 of run time, with the access control included.
Where it beats AKHQ. It ships far more often than AKHQ does, with v3.11.0 released in August 2026, and its message viewer is the better of the two.
Where it falls short. Authentication and authorisation both need a Redpanda Enterprise licence, where AKHQ’s LDAP and OIDC are in the free build. One deployment reaches one broker cluster, so dev, staging and production means three Consoles, against one AKHQ that reaches them all.
Compare Kpow vs Redpanda ConsoleAKHQ vs Redpanda ConsoleConduktor vs Redpanda ConsoleRedpanda Console review
Rank 5 Lenses
lenses.io
52 out of 90 Total
- Licence cost
- Team from $4,000 a year, 15 users
- Free tier
- $0 for 5 users, basic auth only
- Requires
- PostgreSQL, plus an Agent per cluster
- Cost as teams grow
- 4 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 2 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 6 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 7 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 7 out of 10
Why these scores for Lenses
- Cost as teams grow 4 out of 10
- This page’s table and the AKHQ vs Lenses comparison give Community at 5 users, Team from $4,000 for up to 15 users, and custom pricing above that.
- Deployment footprint 2 out of 10
- The AKHQ vs Lenses comparison gives HQ on PostgreSQL plus an Agent and Agent database per cluster, and the CMAK vs Lenses comparison has HQ on a single replica.
- Support and maintenance 6 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Commercial, and the AKHQ vs Lenses comparison has a vendor under contract with team support from Team.
- Access control and audit 7 out of 10
- This page’s table gives RBAC and SSO, and the AKHQ vs Lenses comparison has in-product audit logs with masking global by field name.
- Multi-cluster reach 7 out of 10
- The Conduktor vs Lenses comparison gives one Agent per cluster, with federated multi-Kafka only at the custom top tier.
What it costs. Community is 5 users with basic authentication only. Team starts at $4,000 a year for up to 15 users, and past 15 the only tier is custom priced, so a team of 20 has no published number to plan against. Add the footprint: HQ on PostgreSQL plus an Agent and an Agent database per cluster is three more databases to run than Kpow’s roughly $16,380 a year for the same three clusters. Our estimate of running it, on top of whatever the licence comes to, is 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, about $2,880 a year.
Where it beats AKHQ. SQL over topics, which AKHQ does not offer, plus audit logs that are readable in the product rather than produced to a topic. Team adds SSO, SAML and RBAC with support under contract.
Where it falls short. Masking is global by field name, the same limit this review finds in AKHQ’s. It has the heaviest footprint here: HQ on PostgreSQL plus one Agent and one Agent database per cluster, even on the free tier, and HQ runs a single replica.
Compare Kpow vs Lenses.ioAKHQ vs LensesConduktor vs LensesLenses review
27 out of 90 Total
- Licence cost
- $0, Apache 2.0
- Our TCO estimate
- About $11,520 a year
- Access control
- None in the product
- Cost as teams grow
- 10 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 10 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 2 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 0 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 1 out of 10
Why these scores for Kafdrop
- Cost as teams grow 10 out of 10
- This page’s table gives no licence and OSS Apache 2.0. The card shows our run-cost estimate of about $11,520 a year at 8 engineer-hours a month and $120 an hour, for three single-cluster deployments with no authentication in the product.
- Deployment footprint 10 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Docker and minimal dependencies, and the best Kafka monitoring tools page calls it ‘the lightest tool on this list’.
- Support and maintenance 2 out of 10
- The Kafbat UI vs Kafdrop comparison has the newest release at 4.2.0 in July 2025, with KRaft unsupported and three reports closed as not planned.
- Access control and audit 0 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Access control None, and the Confluent Control Center vs Kafdrop comparison has no authentication, RBAC or SSO, and no audit trail.
- Multi-cluster reach 1 out of 10
- The AKHQ vs Kafdrop comparison gives one cluster per deployment.
What it costs. Nothing to licence, under Apache 2.0, and there is no paid tier to move up to when you outgrow it. It is the most expensive free option here to run, because one deployment reaches one cluster and nothing in the product authenticates anyone: three deployments plus the NGINX front end and the change records kept by hand come to about 8 engineer-hours a month, 96 hours a year, or about $11,520. Our estimate, not a vendor price, for the same three clusters at $120 an engineer-hour. Kpow’s three clusters are about $16,380 a year on the same model, $13,500 of published licence and $2,880 of run time.
Where it beats AKHQ. It is the lightest tool in this comparison: one container with minimal dependencies and a read-focused UI, where AKHQ is a JVM service whose heap you size and watch.
Where it falls short. There is no authentication in the product, only an NGINX basic-auth workaround in the README, so no RBAC and no audit trail. One deployment reaches one cluster, and three reports of its topic view failing on KRaft were closed as not planned. AKHQ’s LDAP and OIDC support is one of the primary reasons practitioners choose it over Kafdrop.
Staying patched. Kafdrop released 4.3.0 on 31 August 2026 bundling Tomcat 11.0.22, which had carried three critical advisories since 25 August, six days earlier. One of them, CVE-2026-65905, scores 9.8 and is an authentication bypass, and all three are still in the current release. Only 66 of its 118 bundled jars resolved to a coordinate, so those counts are a floor rather than a total. Three releases in two years, 106 of its last 132 commits from a dependency bot, and no security policy at any path GitHub reads.
Compare Kpow vs KafdropAKHQ vs KafdropConduktor vs KafdropKafdrop review
Rank 7 Conduktor
conduktor.io
74 out of 90 Total
- Licence cost
- $1,200 per seat a year on Team
- At 20 engineers
- $24,000 a year
- Free tier
- $0 for 3 clusters and 50 users
- Cost as teams grow
- 5 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 3 out of 10
- Support and maintenance ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 9 out of 10
- Access control and audit ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
- 10 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 9 out of 10
Why these scores for Conduktor
- Cost as teams grow 5 out of 10
- This page’s table gives the Community tier free and Team from ~$1,200/seat/year, and the CMAK vs Conduktor comparison caps Community at 3 clusters and 50 users.
- Deployment footprint 3 out of 10
- This page’s table requires PostgreSQL, and the Conduktor vs Kafdrop comparison has PostgreSQL 13 or later as not optional.
- Support and maintenance 9 out of 10
- This page’s table gives Commercial, and the Conduktor vs Kafdrop comparison has a vendor under contract with SOC2 Type II.
- Access control and audit 10 out of 10
- This page’s table gives SSO, RBAC, audit logging, SAML on Enterprise and data masking, and the Conduktor vs Kafbat UI comparison adds audit of more than 70 event types.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- The Conduktor vs Redpanda Console comparison gives several clusters from one Console, and unlimited clusters on Team.
What it costs. Community costs nothing but stops at 3 clusters and 50 users, and it is the tier without the governance. Team is priced per seat from about $1,200 a year each, so 20 engineers is $24,000 a year and 100 is $120,000, against about $16,380 a year for three Kpow clusters at any of those headcounts. Our estimate of running Console on top of the seats is 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, about $2,880 a year. The bill tracks headcount, which is the opposite of what you want from tooling more engineers come to depend on.
Where it beats AKHQ. It closes the access-control gaps this review finds in AKHQ: masking and group RBAC on Team, SAML on Enterprise, and an audit trail of more than 70 event types that you read in the product rather than out of a Kafka topic. Single sign-on by OIDC or LDAP is included even in the free Community tier, and there is a vendor to call.
Where it falls short. The bill grows with every engineer, since Team is priced per seat and Community stops at 50 users and 3 clusters. Console also needs PostgreSQL 13 or later to run, where AKHQ is a single JVM service configured from YAML.
Compare Conduktor vs Kafbat UIConduktor vs KafdropConduktor vs LensesConduktor vs Redpanda ConsoleConduktor review
Frequently asked questions about AKHQ
How much does AKHQ cost, and is there a free tier?
AKHQ is fully free under the Apache 2.0 licence. There is no paid tier, no SaaS option, and no commercial support offering. All features are available in the open-source release with no restrictions or registration required.
When is AKHQ a better choice than the alternatives?
AKHQ is the strongest free option when you need LDAP/OIDC authentication, Schema Registry and Connect management, MSK IAM support, and multi-cluster visibility in one self-hosted tool. It has a more mature auth story than Kafdrop and broader ecosystem coverage than Redpanda Console’s open-source tier.
When are the alternatives a better choice than AKHQ?
Consider a commercial alternative when you need masking that varies by role, an audit trail readable in the product, JMX metrics, alerting, or working ksqlDB integration. AKHQ’s single-maintainer governance model and documented out-of-memory behaviour under high-throughput tailing also make alternatives worth evaluating for large-scale or regulated deployments.
Is AKHQ actively maintained?
Active, but with a single primary maintainer. Ludovic Dehon leads development, with contributions from enterprise users including Michelin and La Redoute. Some issues sit without a maintainer response for months. There is no commercial entity behind the project and no SLA.
For the rest of the tooling landscape, see the complete guide to Kafka.