News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
A detailed guide to Kafka producer monitoring
A practical guide to Kafka producer metrics, JMX collection, alerting thresholds, and diagnostic scripts for Java-based Kafka producers.
Conduktor: pricing and alternatives
Conduktor review for 2026: pricing, strengths, deployment trade-offs, and how it compares to alternatives for enterprise Kafka governance teams.
Kafka scaling best practices: An in-depth primer
A practical guide to scaling Apache Kafka in production, covering partitioning strategy, consumer group design, broker sizing, KRaft migration, and more.
AKHQ: pricing and alternatives
AKHQ review for 2026: features, known limitations, pricing, and the best alternatives for teams that need more than open-source tooling.
CMAK: pricing and alternatives
CMAK is a free, open-source Kafka admin tool from Yahoo. This review covers features, KRaft limitations, security gaps, and the best alternatives for 2026.
Confluent Control Center: pricing and alternatives
An honest technical review of Confluent Control Center in 2026, covering features, deployment, pricing, and the best alternatives for Kafka teams.
Kadeck: pricing and alternatives
Kadeck review for 2026: features, deployment, pricing, and how it compares to AKHQ, Kafbat, Conduktor, and Kpow for Kafka management teams.
Kafbat UI: pricing and alternatives
A practical review of Kafbat, the open-source kafka-ui fork: features, deployment, security, pricing, and the best alternatives in 2026.
Lenses.io review: pricing and alternatives
Lenses.io review for 2026: honest assessment of SQL Studio, deployment complexity, pricing, and when to consider alternatives like Conduktor or Kpow.