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Kadeck vs Kafbat UI

Comparisons
Factor House·August 30, 2026·6 min read·Updated

Kadeck vs Kafbat UI, compared

F1 Kadeck and Kafbat UI, side by side
Kadeck Kafbat UI
Pricing unit Per user per month on every paid tier, so the bill tracks headcount. Free under Apache 2.0, with no paid tier, no seat cap and no cluster cap.
Free tier Teams Free is five users on one cluster, and Desktop Free is a single user. Neither carries LDAP, OpenID Connect, masking or audit logs. The whole product, at any team size and any number of clusters.
What governance costs Enterprise, at 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum, so the floor is 3,840 US dollars a year below ten people. Nothing extra. Roles per resource type, LDAP and OAuth, server-side masking and an audit log ship in the same build.
What it needs to run The teams edition ships only as a Docker image, with no RPM, no native binary and no Helm chart. The documented Kubernetes path wants an external database. A container. A Helm chart is published, and the application computes its views from the cluster, so it runs as ordinary replicas with no attached storage.
Runtime dependencies An online licence validation on every container start, with separate offline activation for air-gapped sites. Nothing outside the cluster. Configuration is YAML or environment variables held in source control.
Browsing messages Columnar record view with Avro decoded through Schema Registry, plus JavaScript-derived calculated fields. Message browsing with custom serializer and deserializer plugins for proprietary formats.
Audit default Enterprise only. Modifications, until an operator raises the level to record reads as well.
Support A vendor, under the licence already being paid per seat. GitHub issues, or a professional services engagement with no published price or response time.
Both products as published in August 2026.

Key takeaway

Kadeck is commercial software, and governance sits in Enterprise at 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum, so the floor is 3,840 US dollars a year at any size below ten. What that money buys is data exploration: schema-aware browsing, an external metadata layer, and a documented dead-letter-queue recovery workflow. Kafbat UI is Apache 2.0 with no seat or cluster cap, and its RBAC, masking and audit log ship in the same free build. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster at a published price.

What is Kadeck?

Kadeck is commercially licensed Kafka cluster management and data exploration software from Xeotek, a German vendor, and it is not open source. It reads Apache Kafka, Redpanda and Amazon Kinesis, and it ships in two forms that are separate product lines rather than two rungs of one ladder: a native desktop application for Linux, macOS and Windows, and a web and teams edition as a Docker image. A desktop licence does not upgrade into the governed web product.

  • Record view: Avro decoded through Confluent Schema Registry and laid out in columns instead of raw bytes.
  • Quick Processor: a JavaScript expression derives calculated fields, with no streaming application to write.
  • Recovery: a documented workflow for dead letter queues in Kafka, in place of a script per incident.
  • Metadata: schema fields documented externally, without bumping a schema version.

What is Kafbat UI?

Kafbat UI is a free, open-source Kafka dashboard for observing and managing clusters, Apache 2.0 licensed with no source-available restriction on production use. It is deployed as a container against the cluster rather than installed per engineer. It is the maintained continuation of the Provectus kafka-ui project, whose last release was v0.7.2 in April 2024 and whose last commit landed that July, and which still carries more stars than the fork. Kafbat released v1.0.0 in March 2024 and v1.5.0 on 20 April 2026, with commits still landing in August 2026.

  • Access control: roles scoped per resource type, from cluster configuration and topics through to schemas, Connect and ACLs, with subjects matched by regular expression.
  • Identity: six provider types covering LDAP and OAuth.
  • Masking: server-side, with three policy types.
  • Audit: built in, writing to a Kafka topic, to the console, or to both.

What is the official 2026 pricing of Kadeck and Kafbat UI?

The cheaper Kadeck line is not a cheaper route to governance. Professional, at 19 US dollars per user per month, is the desktop application and carries no central governance, so paying for it buys a better local tool rather than a controlled one. Floating licences are offered at thirty users or more, and they are still per user underneath. The free tiers are licence tiers rather than trials, so nothing expires: a team sits on one indefinitely and then meets the wall on the day it adds a sixth engineer or a second cluster.

On the other side there is no price to compare, only a cost to carry. Support is a professional services engagement, so supported use is a negotiation rather than a number anybody can budget against, and unsupported use is paid in the operator time that patching, sizing and configuring takes. At two team sizes the difference is arithmetic. A team of five that needs an audit trail pays the ten-seat floor, 3,840 US dollars a year, for five seats it cannot use, and pays nothing at all on the other side. A team of fifty pays 19,200 US dollars a year for Kadeck Enterprise and nothing for Kafbat UI.

Where does each one run out?

Kadeck’s first ceiling is the free tier’s single cluster connection. One connection covers Dev or Prod and not both, and the free desktop edition handles one certificate at a time, so running several TLS clusters with separate authorities means a licence or manual rotation. Governance is an Enterprise property, and the ladder does not go up one rung to reach it.

  • Packaging: the teams edition ships only as a Docker image. No RPM, no native binary and no Helm chart.
  • State: the documented production Kubernetes path wants a persistent external database.
  • Licence checks: every container start triggers an online validation, so air-gapped sites need offline activation and CI deployments need challenge-response activation.
  • Write path: no streaming of derived data back into a topic, and no Kafka Streams or ksqlDB integration.

On the other side, nothing stands behind the software: response times, escalation and fixes come from a professional services engagement with no published price. Patching is the operator’s job. CVE-2025-49127 is an unsafe deserialisation flaw in v1.0.0 that lets an unauthenticated caller execute arbitrary code on the server, scored 8.9 and fixed in v1.1.0.

  • Audit level: defaults to ALTER_ONLY, so who read something is not recorded until an operator sets ALL.
  • Audit topic: must not be compacted, because records carry no key, and its partition count defaults to 1.
  • Masking: configured per cluster by pattern, so coverage is exactly as complete as the patterns somebody wrote.
  • Dynamic config: with the wizard enabled, anything configured there is lost on restart without a mounted volume.

Which should you pick?

Pick Kadeck if:

  • you are one developer debugging locally, or up to five people on one cluster
  • a native desktop install with no container runtime is what is wanted
  • dead-letter-queue recovery and schema documentation are the daily work

Pick Kafbat UI if:

  • fewer than ten engineers need an audit trail, RBAC or masking
  • the cluster count is going up faster than the headcount
  • the team can schedule its own upgrades and write masking patterns

The ten-seat minimum is what decides the second case: the entry price is 3,840 US dollars a year whether the team is four people or nine, and all three of those capabilities ship in the same free build on the other side. Neither product’s access control replaces the cluster’s own ACLs: both govern what a person may do in the interface, and a client holding broker credentials is unaffected by either. Anybody still running the old Provectus image should move to the maintained fork first, on a current release, and then decide whether anything is missing.

Kpow: priced to the cluster, not the headcount or the patch cycle

Kadeck’s bill grows with every engineer who joins, and crosses the ten-seat Enterprise floor the moment anyone needs RBAC, masking or an audit log. Kafbat UI charges nothing for those same three capabilities, but the cost moves onto whoever has to track its release line and apply the fix once a flaw like CVE-2025-49127 is found. Kpow by Factor House prices to neither headcount nor a patch calendar: it is licensed per cluster at a published price, runs as one stateless container configured through environment variables, needs no external database, and reaches up to 12 clusters from a single instance.

A bill that tracks the cluster instead of the roster or the changelog is easier to plan against either way. Put Kpow on that cluster and watch the bill follow the thing your platform team actually runs.

Sources

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