Best tools to manage multiple Kafka clusters from one place

Managing multiple Kafka clusters from one place means one tool that connects to every cluster you run, whatever distribution it is, shows them side by side, and applies one access model across all of them. The options are the multi-cluster Kafka UIs (Kpow, Kafbat UI, AKHQ, Conduktor Console and CMAK), Confluent Control Center for Confluent Platform, Lenses with one agent per cluster, the single-cluster consoles (Redpanda Console and Kafdrop) that you deploy once per cluster, desktop clients such as Offset Explorer, and the operational tooling that runs per cluster (Cruise Control and the Strimzi operator). Kpow is Factor House’s product, and I work at Factor House as a Solutions Architect, so it is scored on the same rubric and the same sources as every other option.

Why teams end up with many clusters

Most organisations do not plan to run dozens of Kafka clusters. They get there one reasonable decision at a time: a cluster per environment, then per region, then per team or per governance domain. When I was asked in a webinar Q&A how a large engineering team avoids too many clusters, my answer was that GitOps and cloud vendors have made new clusters very easy to create, so I have seen organisations scale prematurely, with every team or even every service getting its own cluster. Kafka is designed to be multi-tenant, highly scalable shared infrastructure, and a single well-run cluster handles a very large number of topics, partitions and messages.

Splitting by governance domain is the pattern I recommend against, because domains change: two that were separate merge, or one splits, and the cluster layout cannot follow without a migration. Better governance and audit controls inside a cluster, meaning RBAC and multi-tenancy, solve that problem without adding clusters. Kafka cluster management covers the sizing and isolation decisions that come before tool selection.

Even so, five or ten clusters is normal and sensible, and some organisations run far more. One customer told us they had around 75 clusters across all their environments. Derek Troy-West, our co-founder and CEO, has described Kpow installations with 60 or 70 different network-connected things hanging off them: multiple clusters, ksqlDB and the rest. At that point the tool you manage them with shapes how much of your week goes on switching between consoles.

F1 Fewer clusters, not more

Less clusters rather than more clusters is better. I'd rather see one cluster than 100, but I'd also probably rather see five or 10 in that case.

Chad Harris, Solutions Architect at Factor House

What to judge a multi-cluster tool on

Five criteria decide whether a tool actually manages many clusters or just lists them. Every option is scored against them in this order.

Mixed distributions from one install. Real fleets mix self-managed Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK, Confluent Cloud or Platform, and Kafka-compatible brokers such as Redpanda. A tool that only manages one vendor’s distribution means a second tool for everything else. The test is whether the tool’s own docs show connection examples for the distributions you run.

One deployment or one per cluster. Some tools run once and connect to every cluster, others are deployed once per cluster and give you one URL per cluster, and neither shape is automatically better. A single deployment still has to sit close to the clusters it manages, and Kpow’s own docs warn that “multi-cluster does not mean multi-region” and ask you to install Kpow in proximity to your Kafka resources. A related question comes up when separate teams want separate views of the same cluster. We had exactly that request from a payments company that wanted one Kpow instance for its platform team and another for its operations teams. My answer was that this is what tenancy is for: one instance, with each group seeing only its own resources. Extra instances against one cluster are possible in Kpow, but only in a persistence mode that keeps metrics in memory, so a restart loses the last hour of history.

Per-cluster access control. Production and development are different risks. The tool should let you grant a team write access in dev and read-only access in production, from one policy, tied to your identity provider. The Kafka RBAC tools and Kafka SSO tools comparisons go deeper on each half of that, and regulated teams will want Kafka governance tools for financial services.

Cross-cluster views. A single screen that shows the health of every cluster, and moving between clusters without logging in again, is the minimum. Searching or comparing across clusters in one action is rarer, and worth checking for specifically rather than assuming.

Cost of the tool itself at N clusters. Licensing models differ more than features do: per cluster, per seat, free with paid RBAC, or custom quotes above a threshold. Work out the price at the cluster count you will have in two years, not the one you have now. At 75 clusters, a per-cluster price and a per-seat price diverge a long way in either direction depending on team size.

The options, compared

Every cell comes from the tool’s own documentation, source or pricing page. “Not documented” means it does not appear in the tool’s own material.

Tool	Mixed distributions	Deployment shape	Per-cluster access control	Cross-cluster views	Cost at N clusters	Source
Kpow	Self-managed Kafka, MSK, Confluent Cloud and Platform, Redpanda, Aiven, Instaclustr and others, from one install	One instance manages up to twelve clusters, installed near the clusters. The licence covers as many clusters as it permits	RBAC per cluster and resource, plus tenancy, with SSO (Enterprise)	Cluster switcher and per-cluster resources, Connect, schema registries and ksqlDB alongside. Cross-cluster search is not documented	Per cluster, from $4,500 a year with 100 users. Free Community Edition up to three clusters	Kpow multi-cluster docs
Kafbat UI	Self-managed Kafka, MSK, Azure Event Hubs and Google Cloud, with cloud IAM. Many clusters per install	One install, many clusters	Free RBAC, each role scoped to named clusters	One interface across clusters	Free, Apache 2.0	Kafbat UI features
AKHQ	Named connections, with Confluent Cloud and MSK IAM examples in its docs	One install, many connections	Free, groups scoped by cluster regex	Central multi-cluster view	Free, Apache 2.0	AKHQ connection docs
Conduktor Console	Documented connections for Confluent Cloud, Aiven, MSK and Cloudera	One install, many clusters	Permissions per cluster or across all clusters	One console across clusters	Free tier up to 50 users and three clusters. Team Edition priced per seat with unlimited clusters	Conduktor docs and pricing page (text only)
Confluent Control Center	Documented for Confluent Platform versions only	One install, additional clusters by config	Confluent Platform RBAC	Multiple Confluent Platform clusters	Part of Confluent Platform licensing	Confluent docs: Control Center (text only)
Lenses	Any Kafka-compatible provider, per its docs	One HQ, one agent per cluster	Commercial RBAC	HQ across environments	Team Edition from $4,000 a year for a single cluster, multi-cluster by custom quote	Lenses docs and pricing page (text only)
Redpanda Console	Configured with one broker list	One deployment per cluster, inferred from its config	RBAC needs an enterprise licence	None across clusters	Free community edition, paid RBAC	Redpanda docs: Console configuration (text only)
CMAK	Old Kafka versions, ZooKeeper-based	One install, many clusters	LDAP basic auth and global feature flags, nothing per cluster	Cluster list	Free, last updated in 2023	CMAK repository
Kafdrop	One broker connection per instance	One deployment per cluster	None documented	None	Free, Apache 2.0	Kafdrop repository
Cruise Control	Any Apache Kafka cluster	One instance per cluster, inferred from its config	Not a user-facing console	None, it balances one cluster	Free, Apache 2.0	Cruise Control repository
Strimzi	Clusters it runs on Kubernetes	One operator, one cluster per watched namespace	Kubernetes RBAC	Kubernetes resources, not a console	Free, Apache 2.0	Strimzi deployment guide
Offset Explorer	Saved connections to any cluster	Desktop app on each user’s machine	None for teams	Its connection list	Free for personal use only, licensed otherwise	Offset Explorer features

Here is how the scores work out. For zero licence cost across many clusters, Kafbat UI and AKHQ win, and both include per-cluster RBAC for free, which Kpow does not: Kpow’s RBAC is an Enterprise feature. For mixed distributions from one install, Kpow, Kafbat UI, Conduktor, AKHQ and Lenses all document broad provider support, and Control Center documents Confluent Platform only. For deployment shape, Kpow documents a limit of twelve clusters per instance, while Kafbat UI, AKHQ and Conduktor document no per-install limit. For cost at scale, per-cluster pricing (Kpow) is cheaper than per-seat pricing (Conduktor’s Team Edition) for large teams on few clusters, and the reverse holds for small teams on many clusters. On cross-cluster search in one action, none of the tools here documents it, Kpow included.

How Factor House approaches it

Kpow’s multi-cluster management is built on the view that fewer, well-governed clusters beat many ungoverned ones, and that the tool should make a shared cluster safe to share. One Kpow instance connects to up to twelve clusters of any mix of distributions, each with its own Connect clusters, schema registries and ksqlDB instances, and the cluster switcher moves between them in the same UI. RBAC policies are written against cluster and resource patterns, so one YAML file can give a team write access in development and read-only access in production. Tenancy then decides which clusters and resources each role sees at all, which is how one instance serves several teams without them seeing each other’s topics (Kpow docs, multi-tenancy).

Pricing follows the clusters rather than the people: per cluster, with 100 users included. For monitoring the clusters themselves, the signals worth watching at the fleet level are in Kafka broker monitoring.

The test worth running in a Kpow demo is switching between clusters of different distributions in one UI, then writing one RBAC policy that allows edits in one cluster and read-only access in another.

Kpow live demo

Manage several clusters from one Kpow

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FAQ

How do I manage multiple Kafka clusters?

Run one management tool that connects to every cluster, with per-cluster access control, and keep cluster-level configuration in version control. Kpow, Kafbat UI, AKHQ and Conduktor each manage many clusters from one install. Before adding a cluster, check whether RBAC and multi-tenancy on an existing one would do the job.

Can one Kafka UI manage MSK, Confluent Cloud and self-managed clusters together?

Yes. Kpow’s compatibility list and AKHQ’s and Conduktor’s connection docs all cover Confluent Cloud and MSK alongside self-managed Kafka. Confluent Control Center documents Confluent Platform only.

How many Kafka clusters can Kpow manage?

Kpow’s docs say one instance can manage up to twelve clusters, and that Kpow will manage as many clusters as your licence permits, with more memory and CPU as the count grows. Community Edition is free for up to three clusters.

What is the best free tool for multiple Kafka clusters?

Kafbat UI and AKHQ are free, manage many clusters from one install, and include per-cluster RBAC. Kpow Community Edition is free for up to three clusters.

The rest of the operational picture is in the complete Kafka guide.

Related reading

• Kafka cluster management: a practical guide
• Kafka broker monitoring
• Multi-tenant architecture
• Kafka-compatible cloud brokers
• Kafka: the complete guide
• Best tools for Kafka role-based access control (RBAC)