At a glance
Kafbat UI scores 60 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. Cost a year, 3 clusters: $0 Apache 2.0, about $8,640 to run. The other options, in the order this page lists them: Kpow 82, AKHQ 57, Redpanda Console 55, Confluent Control Center 46, Conduktor 74, 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
- Kafbat is a free, open-source Kafka UI forked from the abandoned Provectus kafka-ui project in early 2024, maintained by community volunteers who sell professional services around it, quoted rather than listed, with no published price and no SLA.
- The tool covers the core Kafka visibility surface well: multi-cluster management, Avro/Protobuf/JSON deserialization, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and CEL-based message filtering.
- Regression bugs across minor version upgrades have repeatedly broken Confluent Cloud connectivity and Schema Registry serde auto-selection; the current release is v1.5.0, published on 20 April 2026, but many Confluent Cloud users stay on v1.3.0 rather than upgrade to it.
- RBAC is available but shallow: configuration is error-prone and fails silently, with no team namespacing, no per-role data masking override, and no approval workflows.
- For teams that need enterprise-grade access controls, reliable support, and a commercial SLA, Kpow from Factor House is worth evaluating alongside Kafbat.
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Try the Kpow demoWhat is Kafbat?
Kafbat is a web-based UI for Apache Kafka clusters. It is the active continuation of the Provectus kafka-ui project, which paused development in late 2023 and left a critical remote code execution vulnerability unpatched for approximately six months. In early 2024, core contributors led by Roman Zabaluev (GitHub: Haarolean) and germanosin forked the project to kafbat/kafka-ui and released v1.0.0 in March 2024.
The project operates under a GitHub Sponsors model, and the maintainers also sell professional services around the open-source product, quoted rather than listed and sold through AWS Marketplace as well: architecture review, custom UI implementation, performance and scaling work, security and compliance, and 24/7 support. There is no paid edition of the software, no published price for any of those services, and no SLA. Development velocity is determined by volunteer contributor interest and the priorities of the core maintainers.
The fork was well received across developer communities. On r/apachekafka, users expressed relief that the project was continuing and verified that their existing configurations carried over: “Looks like a fork, at least I tried it as is, and it is compatible with my old deployment” (Low-Iron6962, r/apachekafka, March 2024). The maintainer confirmed backward compatibility was a deliberate goal for the initial release.
At its core, Kafbat supports multi-cluster management, topic browsing, message inspection with Avro/Protobuf/JSON Schema deserialization, consumer group lag monitoring, Schema Registry integration, Kafka Connect management, and ACL administration. Version 1.3.0 (July 2025) added GCP IAM authentication and MCP (Model Context Protocol) support. Version 1.5.0, published on 20 April 2026, introduced live consumer lag updates and is the current release, with commits still landing in August 2026.
Kafbat review
Functionalities
Kafbat’s core visibility features are solid for a free tool. Topic browsing, message inspection, and Schema Registry deserialization work reliably in stable releases. The move from Groovy-based scripting to CEL (Common Expression Language) filters is consistently praised: it removes the Groovy-based RCE risk while giving users a more expressive and readable filter syntax.
That said, the functionality surface has recurring rough edges. Consumer lag accuracy is unreliable when transactional producers are in use: end-of-transaction marker messages are counted in the lag calculation, causing persistently elevated readings that do not reflect actual consumer progress (krumft, GitHub Issue #1039, April 2025). Filtering behaviour under high message volumes has been described as “unstable and unpredictable” (Rajan Gaul, Product Hunt, approximately February 2026). CEL filters are not persisted between sessions, requiring users to re-enter them on every login (GitHub Issue #1401, October 2025).
There is no message replay capability from the UI, and no ability to add brokers, increase partitions, rebalance, or change replica counts from the interface (Zeenia Gupta, Platformatory, September 2024). These are open feature requests rather than bugs, but they matter for teams that need operational tooling, not just observational tooling.
This scope is broadly understood by community users. One r/apachekafka developer summarised it well: “Kafka UI is great if what you want is a simple CLI replacement… browse topics, consumer groups/lag, tweak configs, peek messages, and mess with Schema Registry without everyone needing 8 terminal tabs. Conduktor / Lenses are more ‘we want guardrails + governance + workflows’ than ‘give me a UI’” (TellersTech, r/apachekafka, approximately 2025). Kafbat is a strong observational console; it is not a change-management platform.
Deployment and operations
Docker deployment is fast: the project is launchable with a single command and accessible at localhost:8080 (Vorrawut Judasri, Medium, October 2024). A Helm chart is actively maintained for Kubernetes deployments, with quick-start documentation available. Some users bypass Docker entirely by downloading the JAR and running it directly from the terminal, which avoids the 4 GB RAM minimum the default Docker configuration recommends (vernochan, r/apachekafka, approximately 2025).
The main operational pain point is dynamic cluster configuration in Kubernetes. Users who attempt to add clusters through the UI in a Kubernetes deployment consistently receive 400 Bad Request validation errors. Static YAML configuration works; dynamic configuration does not. Documentation on how to deploy with dynamic config via Helm is described by multiple users as absent or insufficient (RaWqqq8, GitHub Issue #1637, January 2026).
Other operational issues to be aware of:
- Spring Boot 3.4.4 reports unbound properties when cluster config is injected via environment variables, blocking AWS Secrets Manager and similar cloud-native secret patterns (Heniland, GitHub Issue #1045, April 2025).
- AWS IAM authentication via STS temporary tokens requires manual JAAS config injection through environment variables, and credential rotation is not documented for this pattern (r/apachekafka, approximately 2025).
- The Helm chart cannot mix
yamlApplicationConfigwith an existing secret, has noextraDeploysupport, and does not expose deployment strategy configuration (Helm chart issues #43, #57, #47). - The default Docker configuration recommends 4 GB RAM minimum, which can catch teams running smaller instances.
Access control and security
Kafbat supports YAML-based RBAC, OAuth2 (Google, GitHub, Azure AD), LDAP/Active Directory, and basic auth. Active Directory support was added in v1.1.0 in response to demand carried over from the Provectus project. Community users cite this as a meaningful differentiator among free tools: “Unlike most free UIs, it comes with Active Directory integration for security which is a big plus for us” (Hopeful-Programmer25, r/apachekafka, approximately 2025). Data masking runs server-side rather than in the browser, with REMOVE, REPLACE, and MASK policies applied per cluster to keys, values, or named JSON fields, so what is hidden is decided before the record reaches the page. Audit logging ships as a built-in feature, writing events to a Kafka topic.
In practice, RBAC configuration is error-prone. The most common failure mode is a mismatch between the OAuth token attribute used for subject matching and the email or username format in the RBAC YAML, causing silent permission failures where users cannot see any clusters at all. The project’s own FAQ directs users to enable trace logging on io.kafbat.ui.service.rbac.extractor to diagnose the problem (kafbat RBAC FAQ; GitHub Discussion #290, April 2024).
The security record warrants scrutiny for compliance-sensitive teams. CVE-2025-49127 (CVSS 10.0) was introduced in kafbat’s own v1.0.0: the application accepted user-provided JMX endpoints without validation, and a 30-second scheduler automatically connected to them, allowing any unauthenticated user to trigger unsafe Java deserialization and execute arbitrary code. It was patched in v1.1.0 (SecureLayer7, July 2025). This follows CVE-2023-52251, an RCE inherited from Provectus that took approximately six months to be patched under the original maintainers.
Further gaps: there is no per-role data masking override (feature requested but not yet implemented; GitHub Issue #1311, September 2025), no team namespacing, no approval workflows, and no policy enforcement layer. The audit log feature is documented but inaccessible to users under RBAC due to a confirmed access denial bug that also generates continuous error spam in the server console (povigg, GitHub Discussion #587, October 2024).
User interface
Kafbat’s UI is consistently described as the most modern and visually clean among open-source Kafka UIs, and onboarding is fast for engineers already familiar with Kafka (multiple comparison sources, including Conduktor and Platformatory; Vorrawut Judasri, Medium, October 2024).
The main UX pain points are:
- Filters reset on every session, requiring manual re-entry (GitHub Issue #1401).
- No consumer groups or lag visibility in the Topics list; users must navigate away to find lag context (GitHub Issue #1405).
- The Produce Message sidebar does not retain its “Keep Contents” state between uses (GitHub Issue #1535, November 2025).
- With Kafka 4.x in KRaft mode, the UI shows inconsistent partition leaders on every page refresh because it queries brokers rather than the KRaft quorum controller; at least one user reported nearly aborting a production migration based on the false impression of leadership instability (elielfg, GitHub Issue #1513, November 2025).
- There are no time-series graphs for consumer lag or message throughput; this has been an open feature request since early in the project (GitHub Issue #233).
Ecosystem
Kafbat covers the standard Confluent ecosystem: Schema Registry with Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema deserialization, Kafka Connect with connector and task management, and basic ksqlDB. Custom SerDe plugins are available, including an AWS Glue integration. GCP IAM authentication and MCP support were added in v1.3.0 (Release Discussion #1212, Haarolean, July 2025).
Cloud-managed Kafka compatibility is mixed. GCP Managed Kafka with SASL authentication works reliably, and Kafbat is the recommended replacement for the legacy Provectus image in that environment: multiple r/apachekafka users confirmed successful connections after switching container images (r/apachekafka, approximately late 2024 to early 2025). Confluent Cloud is a different story: connectivity broke in v1.4.x and v1.5.0 due to a metrics refactor that introduced three unhandled failure modes, leaving the cluster in a permanent INITIALIZING state. v1.3.0 works with the same configuration (miehar, GitHub Issue #1852, May 2026). Schema Registry OAuth2 authentication is not supported, blocking use with services such as Google Managed Schema Registry (GitHub Issue #1575, December 2025). Multiple Schema Registries per cluster are not supported (GitHub Discussion #569, October 2024). Flink integration is not available.
Customer support
Kafbat’s primary maintainer, Roman Zabaluev, is actively responsive on GitHub: triage typically happens within days, and there is at least one documented case of an Azure AD RBAC misconfiguration being diagnosed and resolved within 24 hours of the report (GitHub Discussion #290, April 2024). The GitHub Sponsors program offers priority bug handling for sponsors as a formal support incentive.
What can be bought is a professional services engagement negotiated separately, covering architecture review, custom implementation, performance and scaling, security and compliance, and 24/7 support, with no price published for any of it. There is no supported edition of the software, no SLA, and no dedicated support queue. Several issues remain open without resolution for months. The audit log RBAC discussion was closed without a confirmed fix for the user who reported it (GitHub Discussion #587, October 2024). For teams that cannot absorb an unresolved incident in production, the absence of an escalation path is a meaningful operational risk.
Best for
Kafbat is well suited to solo engineers and small teams of up to roughly five engineers who need cluster visibility for development or staging environments, are comfortable managing open-source tooling, and are running self-managed Kafka clusters rather than cloud-managed services. It is a practical starting point where budget is the primary constraint and the team can absorb configuration and maintenance overhead.
It is not a strong fit for teams where several engineers share a production cluster and need RBAC at team or namespace granularity, organisations with compliance requirements that depend on a clean server-side audit trail, teams using Confluent Cloud on v1.4.x or later, or any organisation that requires a contractual SLA rather than a services engagement quoted case by case.
Kafbat pricing
Kafbat is free and open-source under the Apache 2.0 licence. There is no paid tier and no enterprise edition of the software. What the maintainers do sell is professional services around it, quoted rather than listed and also sold through AWS Marketplace, so the software is budgetable at zero and supported use is not budgetable in advance at all.
Pricing tiers
| Tier | Price | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| Open-source | Free | Full feature set; self-hosted; community support via GitHub Issues and Discussions |
| Professional services | Quoted, no published price | Architecture review, custom UI implementation, performance and scaling, security and compliance, 24/7 support; also sold through AWS Marketplace |
Free trial
There is nothing to trial: the full application is freely available. Deployment takes a few minutes via Docker or Kubernetes, with no registration required.
Kafbat competitors and alternatives
The open-source Kafka UI market includes a handful of actively maintained tools, from lightweight read-only viewers to fuller operational consoles. Commercial options offer stronger access controls, vendor support, and broader ecosystem integrations at the cost of licensing fees.
One trend shaping adoption in 2024 and 2025: Conduktor’s decision to restrict its community edition - reducing the number of allowed servers and users - pushed a portion of its user base toward fully open-source alternatives. On r/apachekafka, one developer noted “v1.43 ruined it by reducing the number of servers and users allowed” (Sure-Consideration33, r/apachekafka, approximately 2025). Kafbat and AKHQ have been the primary beneficiaries of that migration, though AKHQ has its own ceiling: “We used AKHQ, it’s a nice tool but you hit limitation quite quickly.” (Senior-Act-3761, r/apachekafka, approximately 2025). Teams caught between free tools that run out of headroom and commercial tools with restrictive licensing are the core audience Kafbat is currently serving.
| Rank | Tool | Best for | Type | Key functionalities | Deployment and ops | Access control | User interface | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Kpow (Factor House) | Teams needing enterprise RBAC, compliance controls, and commercial support | Commercial | Multi-cluster Kafka, advanced RBAC, data masking, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect | Stateless; straightforward deployment; per-cluster pricing | Advanced RBAC; trusted by large enterprises including HPE | WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, with a published VPAT; clean and modern | Per-cluster | |
| 2 Kafbat | Small teams and dev environments on a budget | OSS | Multi-cluster, Avro/Protobuf/JSON, CEL filters, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect | Docker/Kubernetes; Helm chart; dynamic config issues in Kubernetes | YAML RBAC; OAuth2; LDAP; server-side REMOVE, REPLACE and MASK; no team namespacing | Modern and clean; no filter persistence | Free (Apache 2.0); professional services quoted separately | |
| 3 AKHQ | Small teams needing LDAP and OIDC with Schema Registry and Connect at zero cost | OSS | Topic browsing, message inspection, consumer groups, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ACLs, multi-cluster, MSK IAM | Docker/Kubernetes | LDAP, OIDC, basic and external claims; resource-level RBAC; global masking; opt-in audit to a Kafka topic | Functional; less polished than Kafbat | Free | |
| 4 Redpanda Console | Teams on Redpanda or vanilla Kafka | BSL / Commercial | Topic management, message viewer, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect | Docker/Kubernetes; one broker cluster per deployment | None in the free build; SSO and RBAC need a Redpanda Enterprise licence | Modern and fast | Free under the Business Source License, not Apache 2.0; enterprise pricing on request | |
| 5 Confluent Control Center | Teams standardised on Confluent Platform | Commercial | End-to-end monitoring, Stream Lineage, ksqlDB, Kafka Connect | Bundled with Confluent Platform; dedicated nodes plus the Metrics Reporter JAR on the brokers | Integrated with Confluent RBAC | Comprehensive; can feel dense | Bundled with Confluent; no published price | |
| 6 Conduktor | Enterprise teams needing governance and approval workflows | Commercial | Data masking, approval workflows, data quality, consumer group management | Cloud or self-hosted; Console requires PostgreSQL 13 or later | Fine-grained RBAC; team namespacing; approval workflows | Polished; feature-rich | Community free for 3 clusters and 50 users; Team from $1,200 per seat a year |
For a broader side-by-side comparison, see Top Kafka UI tools in 2026: a practical comparison for engineering teams.
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
- Free tier
- Community Edition, 3 clusters and 10 users
- Clusters
- Up to 12 per instance
- 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
- Pricing is per cluster, and the Kpow pricing page starts it from $4,500 per cluster with 100 users included, so a second engineer does not change the bill, while RBAC, masking and audit are held back from Community Edition. Kafbat UI scores higher, because it charges nothing at any size. Our cost model at the three clusters this page prices takes the published $13,500 licence plus 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an engineer-hour to run one stateless container, which is $2,880, so about $16,380 a year. The run-time part is our estimate, not a vendor price.
- Deployment footprint 9 out of 10
- It is one stateless container configured by environment variables, with no database, sidecar or volume, against Kafbat’s wizard-created config that only survives a restart if somebody mounted a volume, as the Kpow vs Kafbat UI comparison sets out.
- Support and maintenance 9 out of 10
- Support is commercially backed, and the Kpow vs Kafbat UI comparison has it coming with the licence rather than a separate negotiation, with Enterprise carrying a support SLA.
- Access control and audit 10 out of 10
- Advanced RBAC and data masking are in this page’s table, and the Kpow vs Kafbat UI comparison has masking policies applied by role instead of a pattern somebody has to keep current, with an audit log readable in the product.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- One instance reaches up to 12 clusters across self-managed Kafka, MSK, Confluent, Redpanda and Aiven, per the Kpow multi-cluster page, and the cap of 12 keeps it level with the uncapped tools rather than above them.
Best for. Teams needing enterprise RBAC, compliance controls, and commercial support
What it costs. Enterprise is $4,500 per cluster a year with 100 users included, so the three clusters this page prices come to $13,500 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 engineer-hour, about $2,880 a year, and the total is about $16,380. Kafbat UI licences nothing and costs about $8,640 a year in engineer time on the same model, so it is the cheaper line while the masking policies, the audit-topic consumer and the static cluster YAML stay yours to maintain, and the Kpow figure stops moving as the team grows because 100 users are included per cluster.
Where it beats Kafbat. The two gaps this review keeps returning to are the ones Kpow closes. Masking is a server-side policy applied by role rather than a pattern set per cluster that hides the same fields from everyone, and the audit trail is a screen in the product rather than a Kafka topic that this page reports is inaccessible to users under RBAC. Support arrives with the licence instead of a services engagement quoted separately, and the deployment is one stateless container set by environment variables, so there is no wizard-created configuration to lose on restart and no 400 Bad Request when a cluster is added on Kubernetes.
Where it falls short. It is not free past Community Edition, which covers 3 clusters and 10 users and leaves out RBAC, masking and the audit log, so a small team doing exactly what this page recommends Kafbat for pays nothing to licence Kafbat and $4,500 a year per cluster for Kpow, before either side’s running cost. One instance manages up to 12 clusters before you deploy another, where adding a cluster in Kafbat is another entry in a config file.
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 Kafbat UIKpow vs AKHQKpow vs Confluent Control CenterKpow vs Redpanda Console
Rank 2 Kafbat UI
60 out of 90 Total
- Cost a year, 3 clusters
- $0 Apache 2.0, about $8,640 to run
- Latest release
- v1.5.0, 20 April 2026
- Paid help
- Professional services, no published price
- 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
- It is free under Apache 2.0 with no paid edition, no seat cap and no cluster cap, so nothing about the licence changes as the team grows. The card carries our run-cost estimate of about $8,640 a year, 6 engineer-hours a month at $120 an engineer-hour across three clusters.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- The Helm chart is actively maintained, the JAR runs without the 4 GB Docker default, and one Docker command brings it up on localhost:8080, though it is docked because adding clusters through the UI on Kubernetes returns 400 Bad Request and only static YAML works.
- Support and maintenance 5 out of 10
- Maintainers triage within days and GitHub sponsors get priority handling, but there is no SLA, no support queue, and paid help only as professional services with no published price. v1.5.0 landed 20 April 2026 with commits still arriving in August 2026.
- Access control and audit 6 out of 10
- It has YAML RBAC, OAuth2, LDAP and Active Directory, server-side REMOVE, REPLACE and MASK policies, and audit events written to a Kafka topic, but it is held at 6 by silent RBAC subject-matching failures, no per-role masking override (Issue #1311) and an audit log users cannot open under RBAC.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- Multi-cluster management is a core feature and GCP Managed Kafka works on SASL, and the Conduktor vs Kafbat UI comparison has another cluster as another config entry with no cap. It is docked because Confluent Cloud sits in a permanent INITIALIZING state on v1.4.x and v1.5.0.
Best for. Small teams and dev environments on a budget
What it costs. Nothing to licence, under Apache 2.0 with no seat cap and no cluster cap, and the only paid help is a professional services engagement quoted rather than listed, so there is no published price and no SLA. Running it is the cost: upgrades across the regressions this review records, the static cluster YAML the Kubernetes 400 Bad Request forces, the masking policies, and the consumer that reads the audit topic. We put that at 6 engineer-hours a month across three clusters, 72 hours, or about $8,640 a year at $120 an engineer-hour, our estimate rather than a vendor price. The same three clusters on Kpow are about $16,380, made of $13,500 of published licence and $2,880 of run time.
Where it wins. Nothing is held back for a paid edition, so multi-cluster management, Avro, Protobuf and JSON Schema deserialization, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ACL administration, RBAC, server-side masking and audit logging are all in the free build, with no seat or cluster cap to plan around. CEL filters replaced the old Groovy scripting, removing that remote code execution path while giving a more readable filter syntax, and Active Directory integration is rare enough among free UIs that practitioners on r/apachekafka name it as the reason they picked it.
Where it falls short. The governance features exist but are shallow in practice: RBAC subject matching fails silently when the OAuth token attribute does not match the YAML, masking cannot be overridden per role, there is no team namespacing, and the audit log is inaccessible to users under RBAC because of a confirmed access-denial bug. Confluent Cloud connectivity broke in v1.4.x and v1.5.0 and still works only on v1.3.0, dynamic cluster configuration fails on Kubernetes, and the escalation path ends at a GitHub issue or a professional services engagement with no price and no SLA.
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 vs Redpanda Console
Rank 3 AKHQ
57 out of 90 Total
- Cost a year, 3 clusters
- $0 Apache 2.0, about $8,640 to run
- Latest release
- 0.28.0
- Paid help
- None to buy
- 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
- Nothing is held back from the free Apache 2.0 build, the same position as Kafbat. The card carries our run-cost estimate of about $8,640 a year, 6 engineer-hours a month at $120 an engineer-hour across three clusters.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- One JVM container runs with no database or sidecar, and it is docked for the memory-growth reports the AKHQ review records at 4 GB and at a 14 GB heap, with no published fix.
- Support and maintenance 5 out of 10
- Three releases landed in eight months from one maintainer, with GitHub issues only and, unlike Kafbat, nothing to buy at all, so the escalation path ends inside your own team, per the AKHQ vs Kafbat UI comparison.
- Access control and audit 5 out of 10
- Kafbat scopes permissions across eight resource types where AKHQ needed Michelin to contribute resource-level RBAC, and AKHQ’s masking is one filter per topic in global YAML, with audit opt-in to a Kafka topic and no view, as the AKHQ vs Kafbat UI comparison sets out.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- One deployment reaches one cluster or many, and the AKHQ review has MSK IAM supported and Michelin running it across factory and cloud clusters.
Best for. Small teams needing LDAP and OIDC with Schema Registry and Connect at zero cost
What it costs. Nothing to licence, and nothing to buy either: the Apache 2.0 release is the whole product, with no paid edition and no support tier. The cost is the heap you size and watch against the reports at 4 GB and at a 14 GB heap, the one-filter-per-topic YAML masking, and the consumer you build to read the audit topic. We put that at 6 engineer-hours a month across three clusters, 72 hours, or about $8,640 a year at $120 an engineer-hour, our estimate rather than a vendor price, which is the same figure Kafbat UI carries on this page. Kpow’s three clusters are about $16,380, made of $13,500 of published licence and $2,880 of run time.
How it compares. It is the closest thing to a like-for-like swap on this page: Apache 2.0, no cap, the same reach across clusters, and the same absence of an SLA. The access model is the one real difference, and it runs the other way. Kafbat scopes permissions across eight resource types and masks server-side with three policy types, where AKHQ took a Michelin contribution to get resource-level RBAC at all and masks with one filter per topic that hides the same fields from everyone.
Where it falls short. This page already quotes the ceiling teams hit: “We used AKHQ, it’s a nice tool but you hit limitation quite quickly.” Heap growth reported at 4 GB and again at a 14 GB heap has no published fix, the UI is consistently described as less polished than Kafbat’s, and there is nothing to buy, so where Kafbat can at least be quoted for professional services, AKHQ’s escalation path ends at 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 Redpanda ConsoleAKHQ review
Rank 4 Redpanda Console
redpanda.com
55 out of 90 Total
- Cost a year, 3 clusters
- About $8,640 to run, before any licence
- Latest release
- v3.11.0, August 2026
- Clusters
- 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
- It is free under the Business Source License rather than Apache 2.0, per this page’s table, and the Kpow vs Redpanda Console comparison has governance needing a Redpanda Enterprise licence at a price that is not published. The card carries our run-cost estimate of about $8,640 a year, 6 engineer-hours a month at $120 an engineer-hour across three clusters.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- It is a container or Helm chart holding no state, plus an external Schema Registry, and the Redpanda Console review records a Helm upgrade bug and Kubernetes TLS friction.
- Support and maintenance 7 out of 10
- Releases reached v3.11.0 on 25 August 2026 after two more releases since July, against Kafbat’s single v1.5.0 in April 2026, and Redpanda is under contract where licensed.
- Access control and audit 6 out of 10
- This page’s table gives none in the free build, where Kafbat ships RBAC, masking and audit at no cost, and the Kpow vs Redpanda Console comparison has RBAC, OIDC SSO and masking all licence-gated.
- Multi-cluster reach 2 out of 10
- A deployment covers one broker cluster at any price, so dev, staging and production means three Consoles where Kafbat needs one.
Best for. Teams on Redpanda or vanilla Kafka
What it costs. The community build carries no licence fee, but it is source-available under the Business Source License rather than Apache 2.0, so it is a licence review rather than a purchase, and three environments mean three Consoles because one reaches one broker cluster. We put that at 6 engineer-hours a month, 72 hours, or about $8,640 a year at $120 an engineer-hour, our estimate rather than a vendor price. RBAC, OIDC single sign-on and masking then need a Redpanda Enterprise licence at a price that is not published, so the real figure is higher than $8,640 and cannot be quoted, where Kafbat UI gives all three away inside the same $8,640.
Where it beats Kafbat. It ships more often and more predictably: v3.11.0 in August 2026 after two further releases since July, against one Kafbat release in April 2026. Where it is licensed, there is a vendor under contract, and its message viewer is fast on clusters where Kafbat’s filtering has been described as unstable under high message volumes.
Where it falls short. The free build has no access control of any kind: RBAC, OIDC single sign-on and masking all need a Redpanda Enterprise licence at a price that is not published, where Kafbat gives all three away. It is source-available under the Business Source License rather than Apache 2.0, which matters to the approval processes this page’s readers go through, and one deployment reaches one broker cluster.
Compare Kpow vs Redpanda ConsoleKafbat UI vs Redpanda ConsoleAKHQ vs Redpanda ConsoleRedpanda Console review
Confluent Control Center
confluent.io
46 out of 90 Total
- Type
- Bundled with Confluent Platform
- Cost a year, 3 clusters
- About $2,880 to run, plus that licence
- Requires
- Metrics Reporter JAR on the brokers
- Cost as teams grow
- 2 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
- 3 out of 10
Why these scores for Confluent Control Center
- Cost as teams grow 2 out of 10
- It is bundled with Confluent, and the Kpow vs Confluent Control Center comparison finds no published price and no free tier beyond a time-limited evaluation, with Control Center, multi-tenancy and encryption each costing extra. The card carries our run-cost estimate of about $2,880 a year, 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an engineer-hour across three clusters.
- Deployment footprint 2 out of 10
- This page’s table gives dedicated nodes plus the Metrics Reporter JAR on the brokers, and the Confluent Control Center vs Kafdrop comparison puts that at 4 cores, 8 GB and 200 GB up to 100,000 replicas.
- Support and maintenance 6 out of 10
- There is a vendor under enterprise contract, but quarterly patches cover the current version only and there is no public issue tracker, so a bug you hit is not one you can watch, per the AKHQ vs Confluent Control Center comparison.
- Access control and audit 7 out of 10
- The CMAK vs Confluent Control Center comparison gives RBAC with audit logging for authentication and authorisation events, while the AKHQ vs Confluent Control Center comparison has OIDC only on self-managed, no SAML, and no data masking described.
- Multi-cluster reach 3 out of 10
- It reaches Confluent Platform only, and the reporter JAR cannot be installed on MSK, Redpanda or Aiven, where Kafbat reaches all of them.
Best for. Teams standardised on Confluent Platform
What it costs. There is no price to quote. It is not sold separately, it is bundled into a Confluent Platform licence with no published figure and no free tier beyond a time-limited evaluation, and Control Center, multi-tenancy and encryption each cost more on top. What can be modelled is the running: dedicated nodes rather than a container, and the Metrics Reporter JAR on every broker. We put that at 2 engineer-hours a month across three clusters, 24 hours, or about $2,880 a year at $120 an engineer-hour, our estimate rather than a vendor price, with the unpublished platform licence sitting on top. Kafbat UI is $0 to licence and about $8,640 a year to run on the same model.
Where it beats Kafbat. Stream Lineage and end-to-end monitoring have no equivalent in Kafbat, which has no time-series graphs for lag or throughput at all and has carried that feature request since early in the project. Its RBAC is integrated with the platform’s own rather than authored in YAML per deployment, and authentication and authorisation events are audited as a matter of course.
Where it falls short. It only sees Confluent Platform, because the Metrics Reporter JAR it depends on cannot be installed on MSK, Redpanda or Aiven, where Kafbat connects to all of them from one deployment. It also needs dedicated nodes rather than a container, there is no published price and no free tier, and this page’s readers are largely people who moved to open source to get away from exactly that.
Compare Kpow vs Confluent Control CenterConfluent Control Center vs Kafbat UIConfluent Control Center review
Rank 6 Conduktor
conduktor.io
74 out of 90 Total
- Type
- Commercial
- Cost a year, 3 clusters
- About $20,880 at 15 seats on Team
- Requires
- PostgreSQL 13 or later
- 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
- Community is free for 3 clusters and 50 users in this page’s table, and the Conduktor vs Lenses comparison has Team published at $1,200 per seat a year, so the bill tracks headcount where Kafbat’s does not. The card carries the arithmetic, where 15 Team seats at the published $1,200 is $18,000, plus our run-cost estimate of $2,880 a year at 2 engineer-hours a month and $120 an engineer-hour, so about $20,880.
- Deployment footprint 3 out of 10
- Console needs PostgreSQL 13 or later in this page’s table, the Conduktor vs Kafdrop comparison puts 2 CPU and 3 GB on Console plus 2 CPU and 4 GB on Gateway, and the Conduktor vs Lenses comparison has Gateway sitting in the data path at 2 to 10 ms per message.
- Support and maintenance 9 out of 10
- It is commercial, and the Conduktor vs Kafdrop comparison gives a vendor under contract, SOC2 Type II since 2023, and business hours on Team.
- Access control and audit 10 out of 10
- Fine-grained RBAC, team namespacing and approval workflows are the three things this review finds missing in Kafbat, and the Conduktor vs Kafbat UI comparison adds audit of more than 70 event types.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- One Console reaches several clusters, and the Conduktor vs Lenses comparison gives unlimited clusters on Team.
Best for. Enterprise teams needing governance and approval workflows
What it costs. Community costs nothing and covers 3 clusters and 50 users, but it is the tier without the governance this card scores: group-level RBAC, topic policies, unlimited audit logs, unlimited clusters and data masking all begin on Team Edition. Team is $1,200 per seat a year, so fifteen engineers on it are $18,000 and fifty are $60,000. Add our modelled running cost for Console and its PostgreSQL, 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an engineer-hour, about $2,880 a year, and fifteen seats come to about $20,880. The seat price is Conduktor’s published one; the running figure is our estimate. Kafbat UI is $0 to licence at any of those headcounts, and Kpow’s three clusters stay at about $16,380.
Where it beats Kafbat. It has the three things this review names as Kafbat’s structural gaps rather than bugs: team namespacing, approval workflows, and an audit trail of more than 70 event types that is read in the product. Single sign-on by OIDC or LDAP is included even on the free Community tier, and there is a vendor under contract with SOC2 Type II certification to escalate to.
Where it falls short. This page already records what its licensing change cost it: reducing the servers and users allowed on the community tier is what pushed part of its user base to Kafbat and AKHQ in the first place. Community now stops at 3 clusters and 50 users, and past that Team is $1,200 per seat a year, so every engineer added changes the bill. Console also needs PostgreSQL, where Kafbat needs nothing but itself, and Conduktor Gateway, where deployed, is a proxy in the data path adding 2 to 10 milliseconds per message.
Compare Conduktor vs Kafbat UIConduktor vs Confluent Control CenterConduktor vs Redpanda ConsoleConduktor review
Frequently asked questions about Kafbat
How much does Kafbat cost, and is there a free tier?
Kafbat is fully free and open-source under Apache 2.0. There is no paid tier of the software, though the maintainers sell professional services around it at prices they quote rather than publish. The full application is self-hosted and takes minutes to deploy via Docker or Kubernetes, with no account or registration required.
When is Kafbat a better choice than the alternatives?
Kafbat suits small teams and dev environments where budget is the primary constraint and the team can absorb configuration overhead. If you are self-managing Kafka, need basic cluster visibility, and do not require an SLA or enterprise controls, Kafbat is a reasonable starting point.
When are the alternatives a better choice than Kafbat?
When you need team-level RBAC, a reliable audit trail, Confluent Cloud stability, or support under a contractual SLA rather than a services engagement quoted case by case. Kafbat has documented gaps in all four areas, and two critical unauthenticated RCEs (both CVSS 10.0) have been disclosed in the project’s history.
Is Kafbat secure?
Kafbat has had two CVSS 10.0 vulnerabilities disclosed: one inherited from Provectus, and CVE-2025-49127, which the kafbat team introduced in v1.0.0 and patched in v1.1.0. Running v1.1.0 or later and restricting network access to the UI are the minimum mitigations for production deployments.
For the rest of the tooling landscape, see the complete guide to Kafka.