AKHQ vs Redpanda Console

AKHQ vs Redpanda Console, compared

F1 Kpow, AKHQ and Redpanda Console, side by side

Kpow AKHQ Redpanda Console

Price of the paid tierIs the price of the paid tier published?Yes. Published. Enterprise starts at 4,500 US dollars per cluster per year with 100 users included, and Community Edition is free. Not a yes or no. There is no paid tier. No. Not published. It is Redpanda's platform licence rather than a Console product.

Access controlDoes it offer SSO and per-resource access control?Yes. LDAP, SAML, OpenID and OAuth2, with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Keycloak and AWS SSO named, plus role based access control at the global and the resource level. Enterprise. Yes. LDAP, OIDC, HTTP basic, and external role and attribute claim mapping, in the free build. Yes. OIDC and OAuth 2.0 single sign-on and RBAC, licence-gated.

Clusters per deploymentCan one deployment manage more than one cluster?Yes. Up to 12 per instance, each with its own connection, Kafka Connect, schema registry and ksqlDB. Community Edition covers 3, and Enterprise sets no licensed cap. Yes. One deployment reaches one cluster or many. No. One Console per cluster. The request to reach several from one deployment is still open.

Audit trailIs every user action recorded?Yes. Every user action on every cluster, recording who asked, what the request held and whether RBAC allowed it, readable in the UI or piped out as a webhook or a Kafka topic. Enterprise. No. Opt-in, written to a Kafka topic the operator nominates, covering modifications rather than reads. No. A Redpanda Enterprise platform capability rather than a Console community one.

Message decodingCan you read messages decoded from Avro, Protobuf and JSON?Yes. Streaming multi-topic search with regex and built-in kJQ filters, scanning millions of messages in seconds, decoding Avro, Protobuf and JSON Schema, with results exportable. Both editions. Yes. Avro, Protobuf and JSON through Schema Registry. Yes. Avro, Protobuf, JSON, XML, CBOR, MessagePack and binary hex. Protobuf works from local descriptor maps with no registry.

SupportIs there a support channel under contract?Yes. Email support and an Enterprise support SLA, with priority support on Enterprise, and a community Slack channel and GitHub issues on both editions. No. GitHub issues. No commercial tier. Yes. Redpanda under contract where a licence is held, and the public tracker otherwise.

LicenceIs the software free to use at any team size?No. No. Community Edition is free at up to 3 clusters and 10 users, and Enterprise is a commercial licence starting at 4,500 US dollars per cluster per year. Yes. Apache 2.0, with every feature in the open release. Yes. Business Source License for the community build: free for internal use, with commercial SaaS use restricted.

What the free build holds backDoes the free build carry SSO and role based access control?No. Simple user authentication is in Community Edition, but LDAP, SAML, OpenID, OAuth2, role based access control, masking and the audit log all start on Enterprise. Yes. Nothing. No. Authentication and authorisation, both of which need a Redpanda Enterprise licence.

Kpow meets 6 of 8 requirements on this page.

Key takeaway

Both are free to install, but only AKHQ stays free once a second person needs to log in: Redpanda Console’s authentication and authorisation both need a Redpanda Enterprise licence, at a price that is not published. AKHQ reaches one cluster or many from a single deployment, where Console has no broker-tier multi-cluster, so three environments means three Consoles. Console’s message viewer is the better one, and AKHQ’s real cost is operator time. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster at a published price.

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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. There is no commercial edition, no hosted service and no paid support tier.

What is Redpanda Console?

Redpanda Console is an open-source web UI for Kafka-compatible clusters, built on Go and React and distributed as a Docker image and a Helm chart. It was originally Kowl, by CloudHut, and Redpanda acquired it in April 2022. It serves Redpanda clusters, where it reads the Redpanda admin API for extra capability, and it also serves vanilla Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform. v3.11.0 shipped in August 2026, with three releases in the two months before it.

Observer Mode matters more than it sounds. A consumer joining or leaving triggers a rebalance, and under the classic protocol that stops the whole group while assignments are recomputed, at a cost that grows with the number of members.

What is the official 2026 pricing of AKHQ and Redpanda Console?

AKHQ costs nothing to license, and its whole cost is operator time. Somebody sizes the JVM, reads the issue tracker before upgrading, and answers for the service when it stops. There is no SLA, because there is nobody to escalate to.

Redpanda Console’s community build is free under the Business Source License, free for internal use with commercial SaaS use restricted, and it covers the message viewer, topic and consumer group management, Kafka Connect management and Schema Registry browsing. Authentication and authorisation are not in it. Both need a Redpanda Enterprise licence, whose price is not published, and that licence is Redpanda’s platform licence rather than a Console product. So a team on Amazon MSK or vanilla Apache Kafka that wants single sign-on in front of a viewer buys a licence from a broker vendor whose broker it does not run. Separately, dev, staging and production means three Console deployments rather than one.

Read that as a team size. Five engineers who all hold cluster credentials anyway: both are genuinely free, and the choice is about which viewer they would rather spend the day in. Fifty people, most of whom should never touch a broker: AKHQ’s access model is already in the free build, and Console’s is a purchase order.

Where does each one run out?

Both are scored out of 50, as five criteria marked out of 10, and each criterion carries the same weight as the others. 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 AKHQ marks 9 and Redpanda Console marks 2. 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. 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.

AKHQ’s governance is present and shallow. 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.

Redpanda Console’s limits start with the deployment count. There is no broker-tier multi-cluster: reaching several clusters from one Console was requested in September 2021 and again in April 2022, and the later request is still open, so dev, staging and production stay three deployments and three upgrade paths.

Which should you pick?

AKHQ is the pick once a second person needs to log in, because Redpanda Console’s authentication and authorisation both require a Redpanda Enterprise licence at an unpublished price, and one Console reaches one cluster. Console has the better message viewer. A team that wants access control and multi-cluster reach without buying a broker vendor’s licence should shortlist Kpow by Factor House, priced per cluster and published.

Pick AKHQ if:

• the access model has to be in the free build
• several clusters have to be reachable from one place
• audit and masking configuration belongs in source control
• the team will own a JVM service and read a Micronaut stack trace

Pick Redpanda Console if:

• the daily work is debugging payloads rather than governing access
• Protobuf without a registry removes a real step from incident work
• inspection currently disturbs consumer groups
• you already run Redpanda and the admin API integration is on the table

Michelin took the AKHQ trade far enough to build resource-level permissions on top of the project and contribute them back, on the judgement that qualifying, selecting and training a team on a replacement cost more than fixing what they already ran. Underneath, the question is who the tool is for: engineers who already hold cluster credentials are choosing a viewer, and a population that should never hold them is buying an access model. Kafka SSO tools covers what that access model costs across the field, and Kafka multi-cluster tools covers the deployment-count question.

Kpow: role-based access as a feature, not a tier

Neither of these puts access control cleanly inside the tool at no extra cost. Redpanda Console’s authentication and authorisation both need a separate Redpanda Enterprise licence from the broker vendor, priced apart from Console entirely, and AKHQ’s access model, free as it is, is LDAP, OIDC and external role and attribute claim mapping that a team still has to wire up itself. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster at a published price, so adding an engineer doesn’t change the number, and role-based access lives in the product itself rather than behind a tier or a separate licence. One stateless container configured through environment variables, no external database, and up to 12 clusters from a single instance.

Access shouldn’t be a second purchase or a wiring project. Starting Kpow against your own cluster shows what role-based access looks like when it’s just there.

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

• KIP-848: the consumer rebalance protocol
• KIP-455: the replica reassignment API

Related reading

• Integrate Confluent-compatible registries in Kpow
• Kafka consumer monitoring and performance tuning
• Integrate Kpow with Redpanda Streaming Platform
• Accelerating incident response with AI queries