At a glance
AKHQ and Kafdrop are scored here on the same five criteria, 50 points in all: AKHQ 37 out of 50, Kafdrop 23 out of 50. AKHQ takes its best score on Cost as teams grow (10 out of 10) and its lowest on Support and maintenance (5 out of 10). Cost a year, modelled: 8,640 US dollars, no licence fee. Kafdrop takes its best score on Cost as teams grow (10 out of 10) and its lowest on Access control and audit (0 out of 10). Cost a year, modelled: 11,520 US dollars, no licence fee.
AKHQ vs Kafdrop, compared
Kpow meets 7 of 8 requirements on this page. One row is not a yes or no question.
Key takeaway
AKHQ and Kafdrop are both free under Apache 2.0, with nobody under contract on either side, so this is not a price comparison. Kafdrop’s newest tagged release is 4.2.0 from July 2025, it has no authentication at all, and three reports of its topic view failing against a KRaft cluster were closed as not planned, though KRaft is the only mode Kafka 4.0 supports. AKHQ ships LDAP, OIDC and role mapping, and shipped 0.28.0 in August 2026. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster from 4,500 US dollars a year, with 100 users included.
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Try the Kpow demoWhat is Kafdrop?
Kafdrop is an open-source Kafka UI built on Spring Boot, maintained by the Obsidian Dynamics team under Apache 2.0. It runs as a stateless Java process against standard broker protocols with no separate backend datastore, and stands up in a Docker Compose environment from a broker list and nothing else. Its scope is topic administration rather than a daily driver, which is the whole of what the README claims.
- brokers, topics and partition state
- message browsing across JSON, plain text, Avro and Protobuf
- consumer groups with combined and per-partition lag
- topic creation, ACL viewing, and Azure Event Hubs
The project is alive without being fast-moving. The repository carries 6,154 stars, it is not archived, and commits landed through August 2026 including a Spring Boot 4.1 upgrade. The newest tagged release is 4.2.0, published in July 2025. It has no website of its own, and the README warns that sites impersonating it exist.
What is AKHQ?
AKHQ is an open-source Kafka management UI under Apache 2.0, formerly KafkaHQ, self-hosted and built on Micronaut. One deployment reaches one cluster or many, covering topic browsing, live tailing, producing, consumer groups, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ACL management and role-based access with LDAP and OIDC. Connections, users, groups and registry links are defined in YAML and deployed by Helm, which keeps the cluster list and the access model in source control.
- Releases: 0.28.0 in August 2026, after 0.27.1 in May and 0.27.0 in March.
- Maintainership: 441 commits from the lead maintainer, 82 from the next human contributor.
- Contributors: Michelin and La Redoute have contributed features directly.
- Assessment: Thoughtworks placed the project in Trial on their Technology Radar in March 2022.
What is the official 2026 pricing of AKHQ and Kafdrop?
Neither of these has a price, so the whole cost is operator time. Somebody sizes the JVM, reads the issue tracker before upgrading, and answers for it when it stops. There is no SLA on either side, because there is nobody under contract on either side.
For a team of five, both are cheap, and Kafdrop is genuinely the cheaper: one container, nothing to configure beyond the broker list, and five engineers who all hold cluster credentials anyway. AKHQ costs a YAML file and a Helm chart more than that, and returns multi-cluster reach and an identity provider. For a team of fifty the two separate. Kafdrop has no authentication to give fifty people, so scaling it means an auth proxy somebody owns and a tracker position that will not move: the authentication feature request was opened in January 2026 and closed as not planned in February. AKHQ scales further on that axis and buys a different bill.
Where does each one run out?
Both tools are marked out of 10 on the same five criteria, for a total out of 50, and every criterion counts once. Nothing sits behind a multiplier, so a total is the sum of its five marks and a reader can recompute it. The five are cost as teams grow, deployment footprint, support and maintenance, access control and audit, and multi-cluster reach, because those are the questions a Kafka interface is actually measured against after the first month: a second cluster, an access review with a date on it, an upgrade nobody owns, and a bill that moves when the team does. The widest gap between the two marks is on multi-cluster reach, where Kafdrop marks 1 and AKHQ marks 9. The marks come from the same matrix used on every comparison on this site, so a tool scores the same here as it does anywhere else, and the reason behind each mark is in the card below, under Why these scores.
The dependency figures in the cards below were read on 24 September 2026 from each project’s published release artefact and matched against the NVD and GitHub advisory databases, so they move whenever a release or an advisory lands. Every jar AKHQ ships resolves to a Maven coordinate, while only 66 of Kafdrop’s 118 do, so Kafdrop’s figure is a floor rather than a total and the two counts do not rank each other. Self-hosting is not the risk on this page. Both run in your own infrastructure. The question is who rebuilds the image when a dependency advisory lands.
Rank 1 AKHQ
37 out of 50 Total
- Cost a year, modelled
- 8,640 US dollars, no licence fee
- Newest tagged release
- 0.28.0, August 2026
- Authentication
- LDAP, OIDC, HTTP basic
- Cost as teams grow
- 10 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 8 out of 10
- Support and maintenance
- 5 out of 10
- Access control and audit
- 5 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 9 out of 10
Why these scores for AKHQ
- Cost as teams grow 10 out of 10
- The compare figure gives free, Apache 2.0, self-hosted, with no feature held back from the open release, level with Kafdrop on price. This page’s modelled cost of ownership is about 8,640 US dollars a year at 6 engineer-hours a month and 120 US dollars an hour; the 10 is for the bill not moving as the team grows, not for total cost.
- Deployment footprint 8 out of 10
- This page gives a JVM service plus a YAML file and a Helm chart, which is more than Kafdrop’s single container, and the open memory reports are the running cost.
- Support and maintenance 5 out of 10
- The compare figure gives GitHub issues, no SLA and no commercial tier, but three releases in the eight months to August 2026 against Kafdrop’s last tag in July 2025.
- Access control and audit 5 out of 10
- The compare figure gives LDAP, OIDC, HTTP basic and claim mapping from an external identity provider, where Kafdrop has none; masking is still global YAML and audit is opt-in.
- Multi-cluster reach 9 out of 10
- The compare figure has one deployment reaching one cluster or many, where Kafdrop reaches one.
This page's cost estimate: no licence fee, and about 6 engineer-hours a month for the JVM, the Helm chart and the identity provider that has to sit in front of it, at 120 US dollars an hour, is about 8,640 US dollars a year.
AKHQ’s governance is present but shallow, and shallow is a different problem from absent. Masking takes four modes, configured globally in the application YAML and keyed on topic and field path, so what is hidden does not vary by who is looking, and only one filter per topic is supported.
Audit: opt-in, written to a Kafka topic the operator nominates, covering state changes rather than reads. No audit view in the product.
Metrics: exported on port 28081, including Prometheus. No JMX visualisation, no dashboard and no alerting.
Memory: a constantly-increasing-memory report open since July 2022, and a second since May 2025.
OIDC: the busiest part of the tracker, with an Okta login issue open since February 2024 and new reports in August 2026.
Staying patched: release 0.28.0, cut on 6 August 2026, bundles 270 libraries and 18 of them carry a high or critical advisory. Sixteen of the eighteen were already public, with fixed versions already on Maven Central, on the day it shipped, and five of those are netty CVEs Kpow had already remediated in release 96.2 three weeks earlier: CVE-2026-44249, CVE-2026-45416, CVE-2026-45674, CVE-2026-47691 and CVE-2026-50010. The oldest has been open 108 days. Every jar AKHQ ships resolves to a coordinate, so this is a complete count rather than a floor, and each identifier can be checked at nvd.nist.gov. A shipped vulnerable library is exposure and remediation latency, not a working attack.
23 out of 50 Total
- Cost a year, modelled
- 11,520 US dollars, no licence fee
- Newest tagged release
- 4.2.0, July 2025
- Authentication
- None in the product
- Cost as teams grow
- 10 out of 10
- Deployment footprint
- 10 out of 10
- Support and maintenance
- 2 out of 10
- Access control and audit
- 0 out of 10
- Multi-cluster reach
- 1 out of 10
Why these scores for Kafdrop
- Cost as teams grow 10 out of 10
- The compare figure gives free, Apache 2.0, a single tier, with no commercial offering of any kind. This page’s modelled cost of ownership is about 11,520 US dollars a year at 8 engineer-hours a month and 120 US dollars an hour; the 10 is for the bill not moving as the team grows, not for total cost.
- Deployment footprint 10 out of 10
- This page gives a stateless Java process with no separate backend datastore, up from a broker list and nothing else, which is the lightest option on this page.
- Support and maintenance 2 out of 10
- The compare figure gives the newest tagged release as 4.2.0 in July 2025, August 2026 work in no tagged release, and three KRaft failure reports closed as not planned.
- Access control and audit 0 out of 10
- The compare figure gives no authentication in the product, an NGINX basic-auth workaround in the README, and a read-only mode that has sat in a pull request since November 2020.
- Multi-cluster reach 1 out of 10
- The compare figure gives one cluster per deployment, with no multi-cluster management.
This page's cost estimate: no licence fee, and about 8 engineer-hours a month, most of it on the NGINX basic-auth proxy it does not ship and on deserialisation configured per topic by hand, at 120 US dollars an hour, is about 11,520 US dollars a year.
Apache Kafka 4.0 supports KRaft only and ZooKeeper mode has been removed, and KRaft has been available for new clusters since 3.3, reaching full feature parity with ZooKeeper mode in 3.9. Three reports of Kafdrop’s topic view failing against a KRaft cluster were closed as not planned across 2025, and no KRaft support has landed since. What the tracker records there is a decision rather than a backlog item.
Authentication: none. The README documents an NGINX basic-auth workaround instead.
Write operations: exposed, so an unprotected instance makes accidental topic deletion possible. The read-only toggle has sat in a pull request since November 2020.
Reach: no message search, no filtering by key or value, no multi-cluster management, and deserialisation configured per topic by hand.
Scale: about 5,566 consumer groups took over 30 minutes to load, and the same view returned in under a minute with that step disabled.
Staying patched: 4.3.0 shipped 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. Three releases have shipped in two years. Only 66 of its 118 bundled jars resolve to a Maven coordinate, so those counts are floors rather than totals.
Which should you pick?
AKHQ is the pick of these two wherever more than one person logs in, because Kafdrop ships no authentication at all and three reports of its topic view failing under KRaft were closed as not planned. Kafdrop suits a single-cluster development viewer and nothing past it. A team that has to name who read a masked field should shortlist Kpow by Factor House, where RBAC, masking and an audit view ship in the product.
Pick Kafdrop if:
- the tool is a developer’s window onto a cluster rather than a platform team’s console
- the job is local development, a dev cluster, or ad-hoc inspection of a topic
- one cluster and a handful of credentialled people is the whole audience
- nobody untrusted can reach it on the network
Pick AKHQ if:
- the tool has to serve more than one cluster
- people who should not hold broker credentials need to see a topic
- an identity provider has to sit in front of it
- the configuration belongs in source control
Check Kafdrop against a KRaft cluster before committing to it, because that is where the reports are. The question underneath both is who the tool is for. Five people who all hold cluster credentials, and free software is genuinely free. Fifty people, most of whom should never touch a broker, and the thing being bought is governance, which neither of these charges money for and both take out of your engineers instead. Both sit in the best free Kafka UI tools, and the identity question they split on is compared across the field in Kafka SSO tools.
Kpow: free too, but governed from day one
Kafdrop and AKHQ are both free, and free buys different things on each side. Kafdrop ships no authentication at all, with an NGINX basic-auth workaround documented as the fix, and AKHQ’s masking is global YAML with one filter per topic, so neither hands fifty people delegated access without somebody building the missing piece by hand first. Kpow by Factor House is self-managed, vendor-agnostic tooling for Apache Kafka, licensed per cluster from 4,500 US dollars a year with 100 users included, so the number does not move when five engineers become fifty. It runs against whatever brokers you already have, in one stateless JVM container with no external database, and one instance manages up to 12 clusters. The Community Edition itself covers up to three clusters, free.
Free doesn’t have to mean built by hand later. Start Kpow today against the cluster you’re already running.
How these tools were scored
Every option is scored from 0 to 10 on each criterion, from the evidence and sources this page cites, and the reason for each score is on its card. Each criterion counts once, for a total out of 50. The options are listed by total.
Sources
- Apache Kafka documentation on KRaft
- Apache Kafka documentation on authorization
- Apache Kafka documentation on basic operations
- KIP-833: Mark KRaft as Production Ready