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Best Kafka management tools for insurers

Comparisons
Chad Harris·October 1, 2026·20 min read·Updated

The best Kafka management tool for an insurer is the one that lets engineers trace a quote, policy or claim message through production Kafka without opening policyholder and health data to everyone: it runs inside the insurer’s own environment and stays out of the data path, grants production access for a task and then removes it, names the person behind every action and data query, searches message content across topics, signs people in through the insurer’s directory, and scopes each team on shared clusters. Kpow, Kafbat UI, AKHQ, Lenses, Confluent Control Center and Conduktor each cover part of that. Scored on the six weighted criteria explained below the rankings, Kpow ranks first with 99 out of 110, ahead of Kafbat UI at 76 and AKHQ at 68.

Tools compared

Kafka management tools for insurers scored against this page’s rubric (read 1 October 2026). Total is the weighted score out of 110, with the criteria in order of weight; the weights are explained under how these tools were scored. Conduktor is listed last whatever its total; on its total of 67 it would tie Lenses for fourth.
Rank Tool Total (out of 110) Out of the data path Production access on request Audit trail per person Inspecting topic data Directory and Kafka sign-in Many teams, shared clusters Cost a year (modelled)
1 Kpow 99 One container, state in your Kafka, not a proxy Time-boxed temporary policies via API, staged approvals, masking per resource Every action with the IdP user, data queries included kJQ search across topics, on the server SAML, OIDC, LDAP; Kerberos, SCRAM or mTLS to brokers Tenants and per-action RBAC $20,880
2 Kafbat UI 76 One stateless container Per-resource RBAC, no approvals, masking for all viewers Optional, reads at level ALL, no view Message browsing OAuth2, OIDC, LDAP; no SAML Per-resource roles per cluster $11,520
3 AKHQ 68 One stateless container Regex groups, UI-only if JWT secret unset Opt-in, no reads, no view Topic data browsing LDAP, OIDC; no SAML Groups by resource and cluster pattern $16,320
4 Lenses 67 HQ on PostgreSQL, agent and database per cluster Strict global masking, no approvals In-product audit log from Team tier SQL over topics SSO incl. Entra ID and Okta Roles on groups only $2,880 plus quoted licence
5 Confluent Control Center 45 Dedicated host, broker reporter JAR Confluent RBAC, no DENY, no approvals Broker principal, not always the person Topics > Messages view OIDC on self-managed Admin access only, per TD Bank $2,880 plus quoted subscription
6 Conduktor 67 Console on PostgreSQL; Gateway proxy in the data path Per-viewer masking, cross-team access requests 70+ event types with user, in the UI Browse and filter LDAP, OIDC Per user or group, most permissive grant wins $122,880; $212,880 with Gateway Core and Protect

No tool meets every column, and insurers commonly pair a management tool for people with broker ACLs or an authorizer for services.

The tools, ranked for insurers

Rank 1

99 out of 110 Total

Try Kpow in the live demo No signup needed.

Cost a year
$18,000 licence for 4 clusters plus $2,880 operator time, so $20,880 (modelled)
Search
kJQ filters across topics, run on the server, with masking
Deployment
One container or JAR, no external database
Out of the data path ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
9 out of 10
Production access on request ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
9 out of 10
Audit trail per person ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
9 out of 10
Inspecting topic data ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
9 out of 10
Directory and Kafka sign-in
9 out of 10
Many teams, shared clusters
9 out of 10
Why these scores for Kpow
Out of the data path 9 out of 10
It is one container or JAR whose state lives in Kafka topics on your own cluster, and it connects as an ordinary Kafka client, so nothing sits between your applications and the brokers.
Production access on request 9 out of 10
Temporary policies grant time-boxed access that an admin or a change system calling the Kpow API can create, staged mutations hold any action for approval, and data policies mask fields in inspection, though masking is per resource rather than per viewer.
Audit trail per person 9 out of 10
Every action is recorded with the user from the identity provider and the policy that allowed it, including data inspect queries, with a seven-day view in the product, the record written to an audit topic on your own cluster, and webhooks that send it to a SIEM for long-term retention.
Inspecting topic data 9 out of 10
Data inspect searches across multiple topics with kJQ filters, which its documentation says scan tens of thousands of messages a second from a topic, and streaming search keeps a query running until it reaches its result or scan limit; Lenses’ SQL scores higher.
Directory and Kafka sign-in 9 out of 10
People sign in with SAML, OpenID or LDAP through Jetty JAAS, and Kpow connects to brokers with any SASL mechanism, GSSAPI by default, or SSL.
Many teams, shared clusters 9 out of 10
Tenants scope each team to its own resources on a shared cluster, which is how TD Bank sets up every onboarded team, and RBAC adds Allow, Deny or Stage per action.

For an insurer. Kpow runs inside the insurer’s own environment, beside the brokers, and gives every team a governed way into Kafka. Data inspect searches across topics with kJQ filters, so an engineer can follow one quote, policy or claim message through a chain of applications without writing a consumer, while data policies mask policyholder and health fields on the server. Temporary policies grant a role extra actions on a named resource for a fixed time, and the Kpow API lets a change system create them. Tenants give each team its own view of a shared cluster, and the audit log records each action and data query with the person who took it.

Where it falls short. Kpow governs people working through Kpow. Quote, policy and claim services still authenticate to the brokers with their own principals, so broker ACLs or an authorizer remain the control for services. Its masking is set per resource, not per viewer, so an owning team cannot be exempted from a policy the way Conduktor allows. The in-app audit view covers seven days and Kpow’s own topics default to one week of retention, so the long-term record belongs in the insurer’s SIEM, sent there by webhook. RBAC, masking, tenants, temporary policies and the audit log are Enterprise features; Community Edition is free for 3 clusters and 10 users. One instance manages up to 12 clusters, and its documentation asks for it to run close to the clusters it manages, so an insurer with clusters in several regions runs an instance in each.

Cost a year. $20,880 on this page’s model of an insurer running 4 clusters (development, test, pre-production and production) for 100 engineers. Kpow Enterprise is published at $4,500 per cluster per year for up to 100 users, so the licence is $18,000, and the model adds 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, $2,880, to run one container and keep it current. Factor House prices Kpow per cluster, not per seat. Kpow is also sold on AWS Marketplace as Kpow for Apache Kafka (Annual), which lets an insurer on AWS buy it through its existing AWS account.

Rank 2

76 out of 110 Total

Cost a year
$0 licence, about $11,520 in operator time (modelled)
Sign-in
OAuth2, OIDC, LDAP or Active Directory; no SAML
Deployment
One stateless container
Out of the data path ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
9 out of 10
Production access on request ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
4 out of 10
Audit trail per person ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
6 out of 10
Inspecting topic data ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
8 out of 10
Directory and Kafka sign-in
7 out of 10
Many teams, shared clusters
6 out of 10
Why these scores for Kafbat UI
Out of the data path 9 out of 10
It is one stateless container with no database and no proxy, the same pass as Kpow.
Production access on request 4 out of 10
RBAC grants actions per resource and a cluster can be set read-only, but there is no approval step, no time-boxed grant, and its masking applies the same way to every viewer.
Audit trail per person 6 out of 10
Its audit log names the logged-in user and records reads when the level is set to ALL, but it writes to a topic or the console with no view in the product, so reading the trail is something you build.
Inspecting topic data 8 out of 10
Message browsing and inspection are core features of the open-source UI.
Directory and Kafka sign-in 7 out of 10
It supports OAuth2 and OIDC, including Microsoft Entra ID, and LDAP or Active Directory, and its documentation does not list SAML.
Many teams, shared clusters 6 out of 10
Roles scope permissions per resource and list the clusters they apply to, with no tenant view of a team’s own resources.

For an insurer. Kafbat UI is the maintained open-source fork of the original kafka-ui, Apache 2.0, with free RBAC, server-side remove, replace and mask policies, and an optional audit log. It stays out of the data path the same way Kpow does, and for a small team on one set of clusters it covers day-to-day message inspection and topic work at no licence cost.

Where it falls short. There is no way to grant production access for one task and have it expire, no approval before a change runs, and masking cannot exempt the team that owns the data. Reading its audit trail means building a consumer first, and there is no tenant view of a team’s own resources on a shared cluster. Its last release, v1.5.0, shipped in April 2026. There is no SLA, and paid help is a professional services engagement from the maintainers, quoted rather than listed.

Cost a year. $11,520 on this page’s estimate, with no licence fee. Running, securing and upgrading it is 6 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, $8,640, and an insurer that signs people in with SAML also runs a proxy such as oauth2-proxy in front of it, 2 hours a month, $2,880.

Rank 3

AKHQ

akhq.io

68 out of 110 Total

Cost a year
$0 licence, about $16,320 in operator time and review (modelled)
Sign-in
LDAP, OIDC, header auth; no SAML
Deployment
One stateless container
Out of the data path ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
9 out of 10
Production access on request ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
3 out of 10
Audit trail per person ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
4 out of 10
Inspecting topic data ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
8 out of 10
Directory and Kafka sign-in
6 out of 10
Many teams, shared clusters
5 out of 10
Why these scores for AKHQ
Out of the data path 9 out of 10
It is one stateless container with no database and no proxy, the same pass as Kpow.
Production access on request 3 out of 10
Groups bind actions to resources by regex, but there is no approval step or time-boxed grant, masking is global, and without the JWT signing secret the restriction is in the UI only.
Audit trail per person 4 out of 10
Audit events are opt-in to a Kafka topic, reads are not recorded, and there is no view for the trail.
Inspecting topic data 8 out of 10
Topic data browsing is a core AKHQ feature.
Directory and Kafka sign-in 6 out of 10
It supports LDAP, OIDC and header authentication from a proxy, does not list SAML, and ships with security disabled until you enable it.
Many teams, shared clusters 5 out of 10
Groups combine resource types with regex patterns on names and clusters, which limits what a role can reach, but there is no tenant view of a team’s own resources.

For an insurer. AKHQ is free under Apache 2.0, configured in YAML that fits a GitOps review, with roles that combine resource types and cluster patterns, and it browses topic data well. Its latest release, 0.28.0, shipped in August 2026.

Where it falls short. Its documentation warns that if the JWT signing secret is not set, the API will not enforce the group role, so a misconfiguration turns access control into a UI restriction, which matters on topics that carry policyholder and health data. Audit is opt-in and reads are not in it, so it cannot show who looked at a claim, and there is no approval step or expiring grant.

Cost a year. $16,320 on this page’s estimate, with no licence fee. Running, securing and upgrading it is 6 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, $8,640; an insurer that signs people in with SAML runs oauth2-proxy in front of it, 2 hours a month, $2,880; and the model adds one access review a year, 40 hours or $4,800, because of the JWT secret behaviour above.

Rank 4

Lenses

lenses.io

67 out of 110 Total

Cost a year
$2,880 operator time, plus a licence quoted above 15 users (modelled)
Search
SQL over topics in SQL Studio
Deployment
HQ on PostgreSQL, an agent and database per cluster
Out of the data path ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
4 out of 10
Production access on request ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
4 out of 10
Audit trail per person ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
7 out of 10
Inspecting topic data ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
10 out of 10
Directory and Kafka sign-in
7 out of 10
Many teams, shared clusters
6 out of 10
Why these scores for Lenses
Out of the data path 4 out of 10
It runs a central HQ on PostgreSQL plus an agent and an agent database beside every cluster, and HQ has no high-availability option.
Production access on request 4 out of 10
Its masking is the strictest view-time model, global with no escape even for admins, but no approval step or time-boxed grant is described.
Audit trail per person 7 out of 10
Audit logs can be read in the product, with no need to build a consumer first.
Inspecting topic data 10 out of 10
SQL over topics is the centre of the product and the strongest query model on this page, ahead of Kpow’s kJQ.
Directory and Kafka sign-in 7 out of 10
SSO spans Okta, Keycloak, OneLogin, Google and Entra ID, with basic authentication only on Community.
Many teams, shared clusters 6 out of 10
Roles attach to groups only, never to individuals, and no scoped view per team is described.

For an insurer. Lenses brings vendor-backed RBAC, SSO, in-product audit logs and SQL Studio for querying topics, which is the reason to choose it if analysts or claims operations staff need SQL over Kafka. Its data policies redact by field name across Kafka topics, Postgres tables and Elasticsearch indices.

Where it falls short. Every cluster adds an agent and a database to deploy, patch and clear through security review, and HQ is a single node that every cluster depends on. Its policies apply to Lenses interfaces only, and no approval step or expiring grant is described.

Cost a year. $2,880 of operator time on this page’s estimate, 2 hours a month at $120 an hour, plus a licence that is not published. The published Team Edition is $4,000 a year for up to 15 users on one cluster, so 100 engineers across 4 clusters is Multi-Kafka Enterprise at a custom quote.

Rank 5

Confluent Control Center

confluent.io

45 out of 110 Total

Cost a year
$2,880 operator time, plus a Confluent Platform subscription that is quoted (modelled)
Sign-in
OIDC on self-managed; no SAML
Scope
Confluent Platform clusters only
Out of the data path ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
4 out of 10
Production access on request ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
2 out of 10
Audit trail per person ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
4 out of 10
Inspecting topic data ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
6 out of 10
Directory and Kafka sign-in
5 out of 10
Many teams, shared clusters
4 out of 10
Why these scores for Confluent Control Center
Out of the data path 4 out of 10
It is not a proxy, but it needs a dedicated host of 4 cores, 8 GB and 200 GB and the Confluent Metrics Reporter on each broker.
Production access on request 2 out of 10
Access runs through Confluent RBAC role bindings, which have no DENY rules, and no approval step, time-boxed grant or masking is described.
Audit trail per person 4 out of 10
Confluent Server’s audit logs record authorization decisions for the connection’s principal, which is not always the person behind a tool.
Inspecting topic data 6 out of 10
Its Topics > Messages view browses topic data, and its review records a rendering bug for compound, nested Avro keys in that view and a Safari authentication failure when browsing messages.
Directory and Kafka sign-in 5 out of 10
OIDC is the only single sign-on protocol on self-managed deployments, with users and groups from LDAP or OIDC through Confluent RBAC.
Many teams, shared clusters 4 out of 10
TD Bank’s platform team said in its talk that Control Center could only accept admin access and was not scalable for their clients, which is why those clients moved to Kpow.

For an insurer. Control Center is the natural console on a topology that is Confluent Platform and nothing else, with Confluent RBAC extending the same bindings to Connect, ksqlDB and Schema Registry.

Where it falls short. It does not reach clusters outside Confluent Platform, so an insurer that also runs Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK or Strimzi needs a second tool. It offers no approval step, expiring grant or masking, and its role bindings cannot carve a delete out of a broader role because they have no DENY rules.

Cost a year. $2,880 of engineering time on this page’s estimate, 2 hours a month at $120 an hour, on top of a Confluent Platform subscription that Confluent quotes rather than publishes, so the total cannot be compared with the others here.

Rank 6

Conduktor

conduktor.io

67 out of 110 Total

Cost a year
100 seats at $1,200 plus $2,880 operator time, so $122,880; Gateway Core adds $60,000 and Gateway Protect, which carries encryption and masking, a further $30,000 (modelled)
Sign-in
LDAP, OIDC; no SAML described
Deployment
Console on PostgreSQL 13+; data-level controls through Gateway, a proxy
Out of the data path ×3 weight, this criterion counts 3 times toward the total
3 out of 10
Production access on request ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
6 out of 10
Audit trail per person ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
8 out of 10
Inspecting topic data ×2 weight, this criterion counts 2 times toward the total
8 out of 10
Directory and Kafka sign-in
7 out of 10
Many teams, shared clusters
7 out of 10
Why these scores for Conduktor
Out of the data path 3 out of 10
Console needs PostgreSQL 13 or later, and its encryption, data-level masking and Virtual Clusters only work when client traffic goes through Gateway, a proxy in the data path that Conduktor sizes at around 20 to 30 MB/s of sustained throughput per instance, with at least three instances in production.
Production access on request 6 out of 10
Masking can exempt users or groups, which beats every other tool here on who sees unmasked data, and cross-team access requests are approved by the owning team, but no expiring grant is described and topic creation that passes policy is a direct API call.
Audit trail per person 8 out of 10
Console logs produce, consume and admin requests across more than 70 event types with user, IP and timestamp, browsable in the UI and exported as CloudEvents.
Inspecting topic data 8 out of 10
Console browses and filters topic data.
Directory and Kafka sign-in 7 out of 10
Its SSO configuration covers LDAP and OIDC, with guides for Okta, Entra ID and Keycloak, and does not describe SAML.
Many teams, shared clusters 7 out of 10
Permissions are set per user or group across clusters, but a user in several groups inherits the most permissive grant, and Virtual Clusters for multi-tenancy need Gateway.

For an insurer. Conduktor pairs Console, a web UI, with Gateway, a Kafka protocol proxy. Conduktor’s Gateway documentation describes it as “a Kafka-compliant middle layer between clients and Kafka clusters” and says it can “mask sensitive data at the proxy layer”, and that is where field encryption, masking of the data itself, policy enforcement on client traffic and Virtual Clusters are applied. Console alone connects to clusters directly and masks in its UI, with exemptions per user or group. The full picture is in the Conduktor review.

Where it falls short. The controls an insurer would buy Conduktor for need every producer and consumer to connect through Gateway, which puts a vendor’s proxy, and a tier the insurer has to size to its traffic, under its quote and claim systems and into its DORA third-party review. Console also needs its own PostgreSQL. Per-seat pricing grows with every engineer who needs access.

Cost a year. $122,880 on this page’s model of 100 engineers. Conduktor’s published Team Edition price is $1,200 a seat a year, $120,000, and the model adds 2 engineer-hours a month at $120 an hour, $2,880. On AWS Marketplace, Conduktor Enterprise lists Gateway Core, which carries Virtual Clusters and policy enforcement, at $60,000 a year and Gateway Protect, the add-on for encryption and masking, at a further $30,000, so the data-level controls take the total to $212,880. Conduktor prices Gateway per cluster with a 3-cluster minimum, and the listing does not say how many clusters that figure covers.

What insurers need from a Kafka management tool

This page is about insurers and reinsurers: life, health, motor and property insurers, reinsurers, and the in-house IT companies and broker platforms that run their systems. For banks that run Kafka as shared infrastructure for many business lines, see best Kafka management tools for banks, and for the regulation-by-regulation view across banks, payments and insurance, see best Kafka governance tools for financial services.

At an insurer, Kafka usually carries the messages between quote, policy, claims and customer systems, and between the insurer and its partners. A Rockset announcement from December 2022 describes Allianz Direct, a direct insurer in the Allianz Group, building real-time pricing, customer 360 views and fraud analytics on streaming data from Confluent Cloud, with teams building their own data products. A review of Kpow from an engineer on a project at Vhi describes a chain of applications that each consume a message and publish the next one, with external teams such as Salesforce and Cerner listening to the output, spread across five or six environments from development and training to production. When a message goes missing, arrives late or carries the wrong data, an engineer has to find it by its business reference across several topics, and that is the work a management tool is used for most days.

The quote, policy and claim messages in those topics carry names, addresses, payment details and, at a health or life insurer, medical information, which Article 9 of the GDPR treats as a special category of personal data. Engineers still need to read production topics during an incident, so the tool has to grant that access for the task and take it away afterwards, mask the sensitive fields, and record who read what.

The third requirement comes from regulation: the Digital Operational Resilience Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, has applied to insurance and reinsurance companies in the EU since 17 January 2025, and it asks them to manage ICT third-party risk and keep a register of information on their ICT third-party arrangements. Any Kafka tool goes through that review, and a tool that runs inside the insurer’s environment, keeps no data outside its clusters and adds nothing between applications and brokers is a smaller entry than a hosted service or a proxy that every quote and claim service has to connect through.

Each of the six criteria this page scores comes from one of those needs, and each has a detail that general lists of Kafka tools leave out.

Out of the data path. A management tool reaches a cluster in one of two ways: as an ordinary Kafka client beside the applications, or as a proxy that every producer and consumer connects through. Kai Waehner’s review of Kafka proxies lists what the second design costs: an extra network hop on every request, a component that has to be deployed highly available or it becomes a single point of failure, and a wider blast radius for a misconfiguration because control is centralised. The same review is clear about what a proxy buys, which is encryption, audit and policy applied to every client without changing the applications. Conduktor is built on that trade, with its field encryption, masking of the data itself, policy enforcement on client traffic and Virtual Clusters running through Conduktor Gateway, a proxy, while Conduktor Console connects to clusters directly, masks in its own UI and needs a PostgreSQL database. Kpow gives people RBAC, masking in inspection, temporary access, tenants and an audit log without putting anything in front of the brokers, and it does not attempt to enforce policy on applications, so the trade runs in both directions. For an insurer the difference shows up in the DORA register, because Article 28(3) of DORA asks for a register of every contractual arrangement on ICT services that separates the ones supporting critical or important functions from the rest, and a component that every quote and claim service connects through is harder to place outside those functions than a console engineers open to inspect a topic. The footprint matters for change control as well, because Claritev, a healthcare technology company that sits between insurers, providers and members and runs Kafka for claims processing, soaks each upgrade for a month in every environment before it reaches production, and at that pace a tool that upgrades by swapping one container image is a smaller change to carry through than one with a database of its own to upgrade alongside it.

Production access on request. AWS’s guidance on temporary elevated access separates persistent access, where an authorised user can invoke access at any time, from just-in-time access, where each use is tied to a business reason and granted for a limited time, and Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management applies the same model with time-bound, approval-based role activation. Kafka has no equivalent of its own, because a Kafka ACL allows or denies an operation for a principal on a resource and carries no end time, so on Kafka a grant that expires has to come from the management tool. The rules insurers answer to describe the same control, since Article 9(4)(c) of DORA asks financial entities to limit logical access to information assets to what is required for legitimate and approved functions and activities only, and for companies licensed under New York’s Insurance Law, 23 NYCRR 500.7 requires that privileged accounts are used only when a function needs them and that all access privileges are reviewed at least once a year. A grant that names one action on one topic and expires on its own, such as inspect on a claims topic for one hour, satisfies both and leaves no standing account for the yearly review to find. Masking is the other half of this criterion, and it has to be applied on the server, because a field that is hidden only in the browser is still in the response; the OWASP API Security Top 10 lists relying on the client to filter sensitive data as excessive data exposure.

Audit trail per person. A Kafka ACL names a principal, and when people work through a shared tool that principal is the tool’s service account, so the broker’s own records cannot say which engineer read a claim. The NORD/LB case study describes the same gap at a bank, which had no separation between human and technical users until each person signed in to the tool under their own identity and the tool applied that person’s permissions to the technical user. Regulators ask for that record as well, since 23 NYCRR 500.6 requires audit trails designed to detect and respond to cybersecurity events, and the HIPAA audit controls standard covered in the FAQ below asks a health plan to record and examine activity in systems that hold health information. In both cases a log of topic changes alone is not enough, because the access in question is usually a read.

Inspecting topic data. Search that only matches a complete value fails during an incident, because the engineer rarely has the whole identifier. The NORD/LB case study describes payloads with 10-digit partner IDs and schemas of more than 10,000 lines of JSON, where exact-match search left engineers copying payloads into a text editor to search by hand, and a claim or policy document is a payload of the same kind. The first report in an incident is also often that Kafka lost a message, and inspection is how a platform team checks it. In one of the four incidents in a talk on Kafka operational issues, the first complaint was that Kafka had lost messages, and inspecting the topic showed they were still there and had never been read. Inspection also has a part in erasure, because when a policyholder asks for their data to be erased under Article 17 of the GDPR, a record on a compacted topic is removed by writing a tombstone, a record with the same key and an empty value, and Apache Kafka’s design documentation explains that earlier records for the key go when the log cleaner next compacts the segment in the background, not when the tombstone is written. A null written through a JSON serializer is not a tombstone, as the guide to deleting records in Kafka notes, so checking the topic afterwards is how a team confirms the erasure took effect.

Directory and Kafka sign-in. This criterion covers two layers that are often confused: how the tool authenticates to the brokers and how people sign in to the tool. Apache Kafka’s security overview lists the first layer as SSL or SASL with GSSAPI (Kerberos), PLAIN, SCRAM or OAUTHBEARER, and Kerberos belongs to that layer. People sign in through SAML, OpenID Connect or LDAP, and the reason to insist on the directory is the leaver process. 23 NYCRR 500.7 also requires access to be terminated promptly after a departure, and a tool that keeps its own local accounts sits outside the process that does this, while a tool that reads roles from directory groups loses a person’s access when the directory does.

Many teams, shared clusters. Apache Kafka’s multi-tenancy documentation treats a cluster shared by several tenants as a designed mode of operation, isolated with topic naming, authentication and ACLs, and quotas, so an insurer does not need a cluster for each application team or integration partner to keep them apart. What a reviewer needs is segregation that can be shown, and permissions alone do not provide it, because RBAC answers what a person may do and not what they should see, and the totals and cluster views a partner sees also have to match what that partner is allowed to see. In Kpow each tenant sees a cluster view built only from its own topics and consumer groups, with totals such as writes per second and disk recomputed for that tenant.

What insurers use Kpow for

Seven businesses in insurance that run Kpow are named here: a health insurer, a direct insurer, a reinsurer, a life insurer, an insurer’s in-house IT company, a broker network and an identity protection business. Only one of them has described its use in public, through an engineer’s review on AWS Marketplace of a project at Vhi, so that card describes how Kpow is used and is tagged with the rubric criteria its evidence speaks to. The other six cards carry public information about the company itself, not a description of its Kpow setup.

Which customer shows which criterion

Inspecting topic data
Vhi
Directory and Kafka sign-in
Vhi
Many teams, shared clusters
Vhi
  • Vhi

    Health insurer, Ireland

    • Inspecting topic data
    • Directory and Kafka sign-in
    • Many teams, shared clusters
    • Message tracing
    • Partner integrations
    • Five or six environments

    Vhi is the largest health insurance company in Ireland. An engineer’s review of Kpow on AWS Marketplace, written about more than a year of use on a project at Vhi, describes following messages through a chain of applications that consume and publish them, with external teams such as Salesforce and Cerner listening to the output. To trace one message, the engineer selects the cluster for the environment, picks the topic, filters on the message’s unique reference within a time window, and checks the headers, the JSON payload and the schema. Kpow is used across “five or six environments including dev, test, test batch, training, pre-prod, and prod”, is used to watch consumer lag during data loads, and is reached only by role: “I can only access it via certain roles that I need to be granted, and it is only through an in-house portal that I can access this tool.” The reviewer rates Kpow’s features well ahead of similar tools such as Kafdrop, AKHQ and Conduktor, and notes that the UI can lag or fail to refresh when a topic is under heavy load.

    Source: Review of Kpow for Apache Kafka on AWS Marketplace (via PeerSpot), June 2026

  • Allianz Direct

    European direct insurer in the Allianz Group

    • Confluent Cloud
    • Real-time pricing

    Public context about the company. How it uses the product has not been published.

    In December 2022, Rockset announced that Allianz Direct, a European direct insurer of the Allianz Group, was indexing streaming data from Confluent Cloud for real-time pricing, customer 360 views and fraud analytics, with its teams organised around data mesh principles to build data products in a self-service manner. Allianz Direct is a Kpow customer and has not described its Kpow use in public.

    Source: Rockset press release on GlobeNewswire, December 2022 (archived copy)

  • Swiss Re

    Reinsurer, Switzerland

    • Global reinsurer

    Public context about the company. How it uses the product has not been published.

    Swiss Re, founded in 1863 and headquartered in Zurich, is one of the world’s largest reinsurers measured by gross premiums written, with around 80 offices in 29 countries and more than 14,000 employees. Swiss Re is a Kpow customer: IT Management’s report on Factor House’s Munich office, March 2026, lists it among Factor House’s customers. Swiss Re has not described its Kpow use in public.

    Source: Wikipedia, Swiss Re

  • Fidelity Life

    Life insurer, New Zealand

    • Mid-sized insurer

    Public context about the company. How it uses the product has not been published.

    Fidelity Life was founded in New Zealand in 1973 by Gordon and Shirley Watson and has grown to a team of over 400, protecting the lives of over 375,000 New Zealanders. Fidelity Life is a Kpow customer.

    Source: Fidelity Life, Our story

  • SV Informatik

    IT provider to SV SparkassenVersicherung, Germany

    • An insurer's own IT

    Public context about the company. How it uses the product has not been published.

    SV Informatik, based in Mannheim, is a subsidiary of SV SparkassenVersicherung that specialises in IT for the insurance industry, from developing and supporting applications to running IT systems. Its own site gives 550 employees across five locations. SV Informatik is a Kpow customer.

    Source: SV Informatik, company page

  • DEMV

    Insurance broker network and software, Germany

    • Insurtech

    Public context about the company. How it uses the product has not been published.

    Deutscher Maklerverbund (DEMV) was founded in 2009 to pool the business of independent insurance brokers, so that they get direct connections to insurers on better terms, and to cut the administrative work of that channel with software. DEMV is a Kpow customer.

    Source: DEMV, about us

  • Allstate Identity Protection

    Identity protection, Allstate group, United States

    • Personal data

    Public context about the company. How it uses the product has not been published.

    Allstate Identity Protection offers protection against digital fraud and identity theft to individuals and families, and to employers as a staff benefit. Allstate Identity Protection is a Kpow customer.

    Source: Allstate Identity Protection

How an insurer runs its Kafka with Kpow

The workflows below are how an insurer’s platform and application teams put Kpow to work across their Kafka clusters. Each one is built from documented Kpow features, and the Vhi review describes several of them in daily use.

Install it beside the clusters. Kpow runs as one Docker container or Java JAR, or on Kubernetes with the Helm charts, inside the insurer’s own network. It connects to the brokers as an ordinary Kafka client with the same cluster security settings as any other client, and it needs no external database, because snapshots, metrics and the audit log are held in topics on the insurer’s own clusters. Quote, policy and claim services keep talking to the brokers directly. Kpow gets only the access that the cluster’s ACLs grant its own principal, and its minimum ACLs are documented, so a security team can apply least privilege to the tool itself. The server of any Kafka UI holds broker credentials, which makes it a sensitive system in its own right: GitHub Security Lab’s research into an open-source Kafka UI found instances running without authentication on internal networks and exposed to the internet, so whichever tool an insurer picks belongs on an internal network behind directory sign-in. Kafka data stays in the insurer’s environment unless the insurer connects one of Kpow’s optional AI features to a hosted model provider.

Put every environment in one view. One instance connects to self-managed Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK together, up to 12 clusters, so development, test, training, pre-production and production clusters sit side by side and an engineer picks the environment before searching.

Trace one quote, policy or claim through the applications. When a message goes missing between two applications, an engineer opens data inspect, selects the topics the message passes through, sets a time window, and filters by key, value or header with kJQ, for example on the message’s unique reference. kJQ follows jq, a filter language many engineers already use for JSON, with the differences documented, so there is no proprietary query syntax to learn before an incident. The search runs on the server, so nobody writes a throwaway consumer against production, and the query itself lands in the audit log. The schema view shows the structure each payload should have, and in a test environment data produce sends a corrected message so the team can see how the next application handles it.

Onboard each team with its own tenant. When a new application team or integration partner needs access, the platform team adds a tenant scoped to that team’s topics, consumer groups and connectors, and maps the team’s directory group to a role through LDAP or SAML with Microsoft Entra ID. RBAC then sets Allow, Deny or Stage per action and resource, with Deny winning where policies overlap, so production can stay read-only for everyone outside the operations team.

Grant production access for one task. An engineer who needs to inspect a production topic raises a request in the insurer’s change system. Once it is approved, that system calls the Kpow API to create a temporary policy that grants inspect access on the named topics for an hour or two. The policy expires on its own, is capped at seven days by default, and is recorded in the audit log. TD Bank’s platform team describes this pattern in its talk on running Kafka at bank scale: an engineer fills in a ServiceNow form, the form calls the Kpow API, and inspect access arrives within a minute for an hour or two, which gives the bank an audit trail of every grant.

Mask policyholder and health fields. Data policies redact names, policy numbers, payment details and medical fields in Data Inspect and ksqlDB results on the server, so an engineer tracing a claim sees its structure and status without the policyholder’s personal data. The policies are built to fail securely, in OWASP’s term: if a schema changes and a masked string field becomes a nested object, Kpow falls back to redacting the whole field, and the plain String deserializer is removed from data inspect while policies are configured, because reading a structured message as raw text would bypass the redaction. An insurer that encrypts payloads itself can load its own custom SerDes so authorised users read the decrypted data while it stays encrypted on the brokers, which is how TD Bank’s platform team describes reading its message-level encrypted topics in the same talk.

Hold risky changes for a second person. With staged mutations, a role can be set to Stage on actions such as resetting a consumer group’s offsets or deleting a topic, so the request waits in Kpow until an administrator approves or denies it, and the full history lands in the audit log. Offset changes have a timing problem of their own, because Apache Kafka’s operations guide says to make sure the consumer instances are inactive before a group’s offsets are reset, which on the command line means running the reset in the gap after the consumers stop. In Kpow an offset change is scheduled and applied once the group is empty, which suits replaying a batch of claim messages after a fix, where the team wants the reset agreed and visible before the consumers are stopped.

Keep the record of who did what. The audit log records each action, data inspect queries included, with the user from the insurer’s directory and the policy that allowed it. Kpow shows the last seven days in the product and writes the record to the __oprtr_audit_log topic on the insurer’s own cluster, where Kpow’s topics default to one week of retention, so for a longer record webhooks send mutations, data inspect queries or both to Slack, Microsoft Teams or any endpoint the insurer chooses, such as its SIEM.

Watch lag during batch loads. Data loads, such as moving records off a legacy system, push large volumes through Kafka at once, and the Vhi review describes checking lag on a topic during them. Kpow publishes consumer group offsets and lag, with broker, topic and connector metrics, on Prometheus endpoints for Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic or the insurer’s own monitoring, so the owning team sees a consumer falling behind before downstream systems do. Lag counted in offsets says how many messages a group is behind and not how long, and SoftwareMill’s analysis of lag monitoring points out that the same figure can mean seconds or hours, so during a load the sign of trouble is lag that stops falling, not lag that is large. Healthy pods are also not the same as a healthy Kafka cluster, as the Claritev case study describes: Kubernetes reported every pod healthy and Prometheus raised no alert while one broker was out of sync, and the broker view in Kpow showed which one.

Govern Flink jobs the same way. Insurers that run Apache Flink beside Kafka for pricing or fraud scoring can put the same directory sign-in and Allow, Deny or Stage policies over their Flink jobs with Flex.

Keep broker ACLs for services. Kpow governs people working through Kpow, not services connecting to brokers, so broker ACLs or an authorizer remain the control for quote, policy and claim applications. Its masking is set per resource and not per viewer. Lenses’ SQL is a stronger query model than kJQ for analysts who think in SQL. One instance manages up to 12 clusters, so a larger fleet runs more than one instance.

To see these screens before installing anything, the live Kpow demo needs no signup and shows data inspect with kJQ, consumer groups, topic management and the audit log topic on two MSK clusters. A reader can check the rubric against the product there by running a kJQ search across topics, following a consumer group’s lag, and opening the __oprtr_audit_log topic on MSK Secondary to see what the audit trail records. The demo has no SSO and no data policies configured, so sign-in and masking are the two things to test in the insurer’s own environment. To run the workflows against the insurer’s own clusters, install Kpow from its container image or JAR; tenants, RBAC, temporary policies, staged mutations, masking and the audit log are Kpow Enterprise features, and Community Edition is free for 3 clusters and 10 users.

Kpow Data Inspect on the MSK Primary demo cluster with three topics selected and a kJQ filter matching messages on two value fields, the way an engineer would filter claim messages on a unique reference

Kpow Data Inspect searching three topics at once with one kJQ filter. The topics in this demo carry airline baggage events; an insurer filters its quote, policy and claim topics the same way.

Kpow live demo

Trace a message through Kafka the way an insurer's engineers would

The live Kpow demo needs no signup. Filter topic data with kJQ across several topics, follow consumer groups and lag on two clusters, then read the audit trail on the __oprtr_audit_log topic of the MSK Secondary cluster.

For platform and application teams running Kafka under quote, policy and claim systems.

Try the Kpow demo

FAQ

What is the best Kafka tool for an insurer?

On this page’s rubric, Kpow: it runs as one container with no external database and nothing in the data path, grants time-boxed production access through its API, masks policyholder fields in inspection, records every action and data query with the person from the insurer’s directory, searches message content across topics with kJQ, and scopes teams with tenants. Kafbat UI is the strongest free option, but it has no expiring access grants, no tenants and no view of its audit trail. For a small team that only needs to browse, search and manage topics, Kpow Community Edition is free for 3 clusters and 10 users, without the governance features scored here.

How do insurers use Kafka?

Kafka carries the messages between quote, policy, claims, billing and customer systems, and out to partners. A Rockset announcement describes Allianz Direct building real-time pricing, customer 360 views and fraud analytics on streaming data from Confluent Cloud, and an engineer on a project at Vhi describes a chain of applications whose output external teams such as Salesforce and Cerner consume. That is why a management tool for insurers has to find one message by its business reference across topics, and control who reads the personal data in them.

Does DORA apply to an insurer’s Kafka tooling?

DORA does not name Kafka or any technology. It has applied to insurance and reinsurance companies in the EU since 17 January 2025 and asks them to manage the risk of their ICT third-party providers and keep a register of those arrangements, so a Kafka management tool is part of that review. A tool that runs inside the insurer’s environment, needs no external database and sits outside the data path gives the shortest answer to what the provider can see and what fails if it does.

Does HIPAA apply to a US health insurer’s Kafka tooling?

A health plan is a covered entity under HIPAA (45 CFR 160.103), and the Security Rule’s audit controls standard (45 CFR 164.312(b)) asks it to record and examine activity in information systems that contain or use electronic protected health information. HIPAA does not name Kafka or any tool, but where member and claim messages carry health information through Kafka, a management tool that records each data inspect query with the person who ran it, masks health fields and grants production access for a task is easier to show against that standard than one that only logs a shared service account.

How can an engineer trace one claim or policy message across Kafka topics?

Search the topics on the server instead of writing a consumer. In Kpow, data inspect takes several topics at once, narrows the search to a time window and filters by key, value or header with kJQ, for example on the message’s unique reference, and the query is recorded in the audit log with the person who ran it. Data policies can mask the policyholder’s personal fields in the results.

Does New York’s cybersecurity regulation apply to an insurer’s Kafka tooling?

23 NYCRR Part 500 applies to companies that operate under a licence granted under New York’s Banking Law, Insurance Law or Financial Services Law (section 500.1), which includes insurers licensed in the state. It does not name Kafka or any tool. Section 500.7 asks a covered entity to limit access privileges to what a person’s job needs, to use privileged accounts only when a function requires them, to review all access privileges at least once a year and to end access promptly after a departure, and section 500.6 asks for audit trails designed to detect and respond to cybersecurity events. For Kafka that points to directory sign-in, production access that is granted for a task and expires, and an audit log that names the person.

How does an insurer erase a policyholder’s data from a Kafka topic?

It depends on the topic’s clean-up policy. On a compacted topic, the record is removed by producing a tombstone, a record with the policyholder’s key and an empty value, and Apache Kafka removes the earlier records for that key when the log cleaner next compacts the segment, so the erasure is not immediate. A null written through a JSON serializer is not a tombstone and deletes nothing. On a topic with time-based retention the records leave when retention expires, or sooner if the partition is truncated to an offset. Inspecting the topic afterwards is how the team confirms that the data is gone, and deleting records in Kafka covers each method.

Do insurers need a different Kafka tool from banks?

The tool can be the same, but the priorities differ. This page weights the rubric for insurers, where most of the daily work is tracing messages between applications and partners across many environments, so it weights inspecting topic data as heavily as production access and audit, and drops the on-prem plus cloud criterion that the banking page scores. The financial services page maps each regulation to a Kafka control.

How these tools were scored

Six criteria, each taken from a situation insurers have described in public or face under DORA and GDPR, score every option from 0 to 10. They are listed here in order of weight; the weights add up to 11, so the total is out of 110.

1. Out of the data path. A management tool that runs in the insurer’s own environment, connects as an ordinary Kafka client and keeps no data outside the insurer’s clusters adds nothing between the insurer’s services and its brokers and gives the shortest answer when the insurer asks which third parties can see its policyholder data. Scored lower: tools that need an external database, and tools whose controls work only when application traffic passes through a vendor’s proxy. A self-hosted container with no external database and no proxy scores 9, a tool with a database of its own 6, one with several databases or a component on the brokers 4, and one that needs both a database and a proxy for its controls 3; 10 is kept for an option with nothing to deploy at all. This criterion is scored the same way on every Factor House page that uses it, and only its weight changes with the reader.

2. Production access on request. Can an engineer be given read access to a production topic for a task, approved and time-boxed, without a standing grant? Can production changes such as offset resets be held for a second person’s approval? And is personal and health data masked for the people who do get in? The wider set of controls over deletes and offset resets is compared in Kafka destructive operations tools, and masking in best Kafka data masking tools.

3. Audit trail per person. When people work through a shared tool, the broker only sees the tool’s service account, so only the tool’s own log can name the person. An insurer needs that log to include data reads as well as changes, so it can show who looked at a claim as well as who changed a topic, and to be readable without building a consumer first. Kafka audit logging tools compares the layers in detail.

4. Inspecting topic data. Tracing a quote, policy or claim means finding specific messages by key, value or header across several topics, on the server, without writing a consumer against production. SQL over topics scores highest, filtered search across topics next, and browsing or filtering one topic at a time a point lower. Best Kafka message search tools covers search in detail.

5. Directory and Kafka sign-in. People should sign in through the insurer’s directory, whether that is LDAP directly or SAML and OIDC in front of Active Directory or Entra ID, with directory groups mapped to roles. On the cluster side the tool has to connect the way the insurer’s clusters already authenticate clients, whether that is SASL, Kerberos or mutual TLS. Kafka SSO tools covers the protocol detail.

6. Many teams, shared clusters. Application teams and integration partners share a handful of clusters across several environments, so each team needs to be scoped to its own topics, consumer groups and connectors, and the platform team should onboard a team with a policy rather than a cluster. Reaching cloud and on-prem clusters from one deployment is not scored here; best tools to manage multiple Kafka clusters from one place compares it.

The cost figures model an insurer running 4 clusters (development, test, pre-production and production) for 100 engineers at $120 an engineer-hour, and each card prints its own assumptions. The general listicle view, without the insurance weighting, is in best Kafka management tools.

F1 What an insurer runs into, and what the Kafka tool has to do about it
What happens at an insurer What the Kafka tool has to do
Third-party review Under DORA, insurers and reinsurers manage the risk of every ICT third-party provider and keep a register of those arrangements Run inside the insurer's own environment as a Kafka client, with no external database and no vendor proxy
Tracing a message A quote, policy or claim message passes through a chain of applications and partner integrations, and an engineer has to find where it stopped Search message content across topics on the server, by a business key and a time window, without writing a consumer
Personal and health data Production topics carry policyholder details, claims and, at a health insurer, medical information Grant read access for the task and let it expire, mask sensitive fields, and hold risky changes for a second person
Who did what Security and audit ask who read or changed production data, and when Log each action and data query with the person from the directory, readable without building a consumer
Many teams and environments Application teams and integration partners share clusters across development, test, training, pre-production and production Scope each team to its own topics, consumer groups and connectors, with directory groups mapped to roles
Each row is a situation insurers describe in public or face under DORA and GDPR, followed by the behaviour a management tool needs in order to handle it without a workaround.

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. The criteria are weighted: Out of the data path counts three times, Production access on request counts twice, Audit trail per person counts twice, Inspecting topic data counts twice, Directory and Kafka sign-in counts once and Many teams, shared clusters counts once, for a total out of 110. Out of the data path counts three times because DORA has applied to insurers and reinsurers in the EU since January 2025 and asks them to manage the risk of every ICT third-party provider, so a tool that sits between applications and brokers puts one more component on the path that quote, policy and claim messages take, and a tool that keeps its state in a database of its own is one more system to run and to clear through that review. Production access and the per-person audit trail count twice, because production topics carry personal and health data, and the two questions a security team asks are who could read it and who actually did. Inspecting topic data also counts twice, because tracing one quote, policy or claim message through a chain of applications and partners is the work an insurer's engineer describes doing most in the one public account of Kpow at an insurer. Directory sign-in and shared clusters count once. This page is published by Factor House, which makes Kpow. Every option is scored on the same rubric and the same sources: Kpow's per-criterion scores are set the same way as every other option's and are not adjusted, and the weights apply to every option alike. Kpow ranks first on its total of 99 out of 110. The other options follow by total. Conduktor is listed last whatever its total; on its total of 67 it would tie for fourth with Lenses.

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