Kafbat UI vs Redpanda Console
ComparisonsKafbat UI vs Redpanda Console, compared
Key takeaway
Kafbat UI and Redpanda Console are both web interfaces over a Kafka cluster somebody else runs, both free to start and deployed as a container, so neither list nor price separates them. Kafbat UI is Apache 2.0 with nothing held back, shipping role-based access control across eight resource types free. Redpanda Console is source-available under the Business Source License with a paid tier: RBAC and SSO need a Redpanda Enterprise licence, the broker vendor’s platform licence, and it reaches one cluster per instance with no built-in metrics. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster at a published price.
What is Kafbat UI?
Kafbat UI is a free, open-source web dashboard for observing and managing Apache Kafka clusters, deployed as a container. It is Apache 2.0 licensed, with no source-available restriction on production use, and it is the maintained continuation of the Provectus kafka-ui project, carried on by contributors from that project’s inception.
The fork history is why the two names collide in search. Provectus kafka-ui shipped its last release, v0.7.2, in April 2024 and took its last commit that July. Kafbat is where the work went. The awkward consequence is audience: the dormant repository carries 12,200 stars against Kafbat’s 2,642, so the first result many engineers reach is the abandoned one, and aggregator listings still rank the two lineages as separate projects with the dormant one first. The company behind the fork sells professional services rather than a paid edition.
What is Redpanda Console?
Redpanda Console is a source-available web UI for inspecting and managing Kafka-compatible clusters, built in Go and React and distributed as a Docker image and a Helm chart. It started as Kowl, by CloudHut, and Redpanda acquired it in April 2022. It serves Redpanda clusters, where it integrates with the Redpanda admin API, and it also serves vanilla Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform.
The licence is what makes it a different kind of product. Two licences run in parallel: the Business Source License covers the non-enterprise code and converts to Apache 2.0 at a change date, and a separate Redpanda Community License covers the paid enterprise features. That is source-available rather than open source, and third parties routinely label it OSS. In practice it is a viewer and a debugging surface first and an operational platform second, and its message browser is the strongest part of the product.
What is the official 2026 pricing of Kafbat UI and Redpanda Console?
Kafbat UI is Apache 2.0 with no paid tier, no seat cap and no cluster cap, and nothing is held back from the open release. Redpanda Console’s community edition is free indefinitely under the Business Source License, covering the message viewer, topic and consumer group management, Kafka Connect management and Schema Registry browsing. Both are free at the door, and that is where the similarity ends.
What money buys differs. On Kafbat there is nothing to buy inside the product: the money is in professional services around the software, quoted rather than listed. On Console the money buys the governance layer, under a Redpanda Enterprise licence, which is the broker vendor’s platform licence. Both tools read the broker’s own ACLs, which Kafka enforces whichever interface sits in front of it; what one of them charges for is the access model over the interface itself. So a team on Amazon MSK, Confluent Platform or vanilla Apache Kafka that wants role-based access control in its Kafka UI is buying a broker vendor’s enterprise licence without running that broker. Kafbat manages several clusters from one interface; Console does not, so dev, staging and production is three instances, and Console also needs an external Schema Registry beside it.
Where does each one run out?
Kafbat’s audit log is real, and its defaults undo half of it. The level switch defaults to ALTER_ONLY, so who changed something is captured and who looked at it is not, until an operator sets ALL. Three published unauthenticated remote-code-execution CVEs sit across the two lineages, scored 8.9, 8.8 and 8.1, and every one is remedied by an upgrade somebody on the operator’s side performs.
- Audit topic: must not be compacted, because records carry no key, and its partition count defaults to 1.
- Releases: five across 2025, then v1.5.0 on 20 April 2026 and none since, against commits still landing in August 2026.
- Dynamic config: the wizard writes inside the container and overwrites the file in full, so UI changes are lost on restart without a volume.
- Metrics: no stored time series. The request for graphed lag and publish counts has been open since March 2024.
Console’s limits start at the licence. Role-based access control and identity-provider single sign-on both require an enterprise licence, and the consequence is sharper than the gate: where Console has enterprise features enabled and cannot find a valid licence, it redirects to a licence-expiration page and restricts all other access, and one already expired at startup prints an error and exits.
- SSO scope: Console SSO spans Enterprise Self-Managed, BYOC and Dedicated, while OIDC for the Kafka, HTTP Proxy, Admin and Schema Registry APIs is Self-Managed only.
- Timeouts: six seconds for DescribeLogDirs and Metadata, five for DescribeConfigs and thirty-five for ListMessages, none exposed in the reference configuration.
- Degradation: one broker offline in a multi-node cluster fails every consumer-group query with a shard error.
- Scope: no built-in broker metrics, no alerting, no historical trends, no request quotas, no partition rebalancing, and no producing a message.
Which should you pick?
Pick Kafbat UI if:
- the access model is the project, on a shared cluster or across several teams
- role-based access, single sign-on and an audit trail have to exist without a licence conversation
- the audit trail should go into Kafka itself rather than a second datastore
Pick Redpanda Console if:
- the job is debugging and the cluster is already governed somewhere else
- inspection must not join a consumer group or move committed offsets
- Protobuf has to decode from local descriptor maps with no registry involved
On Kafbat, set level: ALL on day one, raise the audit topic’s partition count before anybody notices it, and pin the image to the Kafbat lineage rather than the Provectus one. On Console, budget one instance per environment and a Prometheus and Grafana stack beside them. These two are not really competing for the same slot: the question is where governance is going to live, in the tool or in a broker vendor’s licence.
Kpow: governance that answers to the cluster
Both of these tie governance to something other than the cluster you are actually running. Kafbat UI ships governance features free, but there is no vendor behind them if something goes wrong: support is a quoted professional-services engagement rather than a subscription, and the level switch controlling the audit log defaults to ALTER_ONLY until an operator raises it by hand. Redpanda Console ties governance to a different outside party: SSO and interface RBAC require a Redpanda Enterprise licence, the broker vendor’s own platform licence, whether or not you run a Redpanda broker at all. Kpow by Factor House attaches governance to the cluster itself: it is licensed per cluster at a published price, so adding an engineer does not move the number, and it runs as a single stateless JVM container configured through environment variables, with no external database and no sidecar.
That per-cluster price sits in full on Kpow’s product page, attached to the cluster rather than to either vendor’s own terms.
Sources
- Apache Kafka documentation on authorization
- Apache Kafka documentation on consumer groups
- Apache Kafka documentation on log compaction
- NVD record for CVE-2025-49127
- NVD record for CVE-2023-52251
- NVD record for CVE-2024-32030
- Business Source License 1.1