Kafka-UI(10.3k)
Kafka-UI is an open-source web-based interface designed to simplify the management and monitoring of Apache Kafka clusters. Developed to provide a user-friendly alternative to command-line tools, it enables users to visualize and interact with Kafka components through a graphical dashboard.
Features
Multi-Cluster Management — monitor and manage all your clusters in one place
Performance Monitoring with Metrics Dashboard — track key Kafka metrics with a lightweight dashboard
View Kafka Brokers — view topic and partition assignments, controller status
View Kafka Topics — view partition count, replication status, and custom configuration
View Consumer Groups — view per-partition parked offsets, combined and per-partition lag
Browse Messages — browse messages with JSON, plain text, and Avro encoding
Dynamic Topic Configuration — create and configure new topics with dynamic configuration
Configurable Authentification — secure your installation with optional Github/Gitlab/Google OAuth 2.0
Custom serialization/deserialization plugins - use a ready-to-go serde for your data like AWS Glue or Smile, or code your own!
Role based access control - manage permissions to access the UI with granular precision
Data masking - obfuscate sensitive data in topic messages
AKHQ (3.6k star)
AKHQ, formerly known as KafkaHQ, is an open-source Kafka GUI designed to help users manage topics, topic data, consumer groups, and more.
Features
Cluster Management
Supports managing multiple clusters and can monitor Kafka clusters with standard, SSL, and SASL authentication.
Provides node configuration, log viewing, and ACL (Access Control List) management capabilities.
Topic Operations
Supports creating and deleting topics, configuring partitions, and replica assignments.
Allows browsing topic data, viewing message offsets, key-value pairs, timestamps, and headers. It also supports automatic deserialization of Avro data (requires integration with Schema Registry).
Consumer Group Management
Displays real-time lag and partition assignment status of consumer groups.
Supports resetting consumer offsets to specific timestamps or to the beginning/end positions.
Integration and Extension
Compatible with Schema Registry, allowing management of Avro schema lifecycle (creation, update, deletion).
Supports Kafka Connect, providing start/stop, configuration, and task monitoring for connectors.
Burrow(3.8k star)
Burrow is an open-source project developed by Linkedin. Burrow is a monitoring companion for Apache Kafka that provides consumer lag checking as a service without the need for specifying thresholds. It monitors committed offsets for all consumers and calculates the status of those consumers on demand. An HTTP endpoint is provided to request status on demand, as well as provide other Kafka cluster information. There are also configurable notifiers that can send status out via email or HTTP calls to another service.
Compared to other products, Burrow's advantage lies in its ability to monitor and visualize consumer lag.
Features
NO THRESHOLDS! Groups are evaluated over a sliding window.
Multiple Kafka Cluster support
Automatically monitors all consumers using Kafka-committed offsets
Configurable support for Zookeeper-committed offsets
Configurable support for Storm-committed offsets
HTTP endpoint for consumer group status, as well as broker and consumer information
Configurable emailer for sending alerts to specific groups
Configurable HTTP client for sending alerts to another system for all groups
Cluster Manager for Apache Kafka (CMAK) | Kafka Manager (11.9k)
CMAK (previously known as Kafka Manager) is an open-source Kafka monitoring framework, developed by Yahoo in 2015. It is primarily used for managing and monitoring Kafka clusters, offering a comprehensive set of monitoring features and operational management capabilities.
Features
CMAK is a supporter of the following:
Manage multiple clusters
Cluster state can be easily inspected (topics: consumers, offsets and brokers, replica distributions, partition distributions).
Run preferred replica election
Select brokers to use when generating partition assignments
Reassign partitions (based on generated assignments).
Create a topic using optional topic configurations (0.8.1.1 uses different configs from 0.8.2+).
Delete topic (only supported on 0.8.2+ and remember set delete.topic.enable=true in broker config)
Topic list now shows topics that have been marked as deleted (only compatible with 0.8.2+).
Select brokers to use when batch generating partition assignments for multiple topics
Reassignment of multiple partitions in a batch
Add new partitions to an existing topic
Update topic config
You can enable JMX polling to collect metrics at the broker and topic levels.
Filter out users who do not have an id/ owner/ offsets/ directory in Zookeeper.
Conduktor
Conduktor is a platform that allows users to manage, monitor and analyze Kafka clusters. Conduktor provides a powerful interface for managing Kafka resources and performing analytics. It also includes tools to monitor tasks. Conduktor also includes enterprise features like data masking, cold storage, multiple tenancy, auditor logs, message encryption and many others. This makes it a great solution for large companies that need to meet strict compliance and governance requirements.
Conduktor is not an open-source software. It provides some free capabilities for managing Kafka clusters, but charges for certain enterprise-level features like security. Compared to other open-source products, its overall UI and functionality quality are higher due to the support of a commercial company.
Kafdrop(5.7k)
Kafdrop is an open-source web UI for viewing Kafka topics and browsing consumer groups. This project is a rebooted version of Kafdrop 2.0, updated to support Java 17+ and Kafka 2.x. It also integrates with Helm and Kubernetes. Running on Spring Boot, Kafdrop is lightweight, easy to configure, and supports SASL and TLS secured brokers.
Features
View Kafka brokers — topic and partition assignments, and controller status
View topics — partition count, replication status, and custom configuration
Browse messages — JSON, plain text, Avro and Protobuf encoding
View consumer groups — per-partition parked offsets, combined and per-partition lag
Create new topics
View ACLs
Support for Azure Event Hubs
Confluent Control Center
Confluent Control Center is a Kafka management tool provided by Confluent for managing and monitoring Apache Kafka within the Confluent Platform. It offers a user interface that allows you to quickly overview cluster health, observe and control messages, topics, and the Schema Registry, and develop and run ksqlDB queries.
If you're already using the Confluent Platform, then using Confluent Control Center is a good choice.
Kafka IDE
Kafka IDE is a desktop application that offers advanced features for observability and data visualization, along with basic management options. Unlike other Kafka management tools, it can automatically infer and edit schema structures without the need for a Schema Registry.
Kowl / Redpanda Console(3.9k)
Redpanda Console, formerly known as Kowl, is a web-based application that allows you to manage and debug Kafka/Redpanda workloads with ease.
Features
Message Viewer: Browse your topic's messages using dynamic filters and ad hoc queries. JavaScript filters can be used to find any message. The supported encodings include: JSON (hex), Avro, Protobuf CBOR, MessagePack Text, Binary and Binary Hex. Automatic recognition of the encoding used (except Protobuf, CBOR and Text).
Consumer Groups: List your active consumer group along with the active group offsets. Edit group offsets by group, topic, or partition or delete a group.
Topic overview Browse your Kafka topic list, check the configuration and space usage. List all consumers that consume a topic, or view partition details such as message count and low/high water marks. ...), Embed topic documentation from a Git repository.
Overview of the cluster: List brokers available, their space usage and rack ID, as well as health, configuration, and other details to get an overview at a high-level.
Security Create, list or modify SASL-SCRAM Users and Kafka ACLs.
Schema registry: List all your Avro Protobuf JSON schemas in your schema registry.
Kafka Connect: Manage connect clusters and manage connectors. Patch configs. View their current status. Restart tasks.
Redpanda Transformations: Manage, monitor and deploy data transformations in your Redpanda Cluster.
kPow
Kpow is the toolkit that empowers your team to deliver with Kafka.Once installed, Kpow gathers information about your Kafka resources every minute, stores the results locally in internal topics, then provides custom telemetry and insights to you in a rich data-oriented UI.
kpow is a commercial product that also offers a free basic version. It has clients such as BINANCE and Cash App.
Features
Kpow provides full support to control and monitor Kafka Connect Clusters and Schema Registries.
Deep data inspection with kJQ : kJQ can be used to inspect data in JSON or JSON like format, including Apache Avro (r), Transit messages, EDN messages, and Protobuf messages, where you've configured custom serdes that output JSON formatted texts.
Console to monitor and control streams: Kpow compute allows you to access your Kafka consumer topologies (and soon KafkaStreams), allowing for visualization of the message throughput at consumption point and the ability of resetting consumption on a group, member, topic or assignment level.
Authentication of users via LDAP, SAML or OpenID configuration.
Simple or Role Based Access Controls can be used to authorize users.
Data policies to mask and redact sensitive data such as Credit Card or PII.
Kpow Audit Log: Data Governance with all actions of users captured.
Integration of Slack to send user actions to a channel for operations as they occur.
HTTPS can be configured easily with your own certificate or integrated with reverse proxy.
Integrate Prometheus with your preferred metrics systems and alerting systems.
Monitoring of multiple clusters from a single location for simplicity and cost-efficiency.
Kpow is perfect for environments with air gaps because it contains all data on local topics.
Lenses
Lenses is a simple, powerful and secure self service DataOps platform. Operate with confidence on Apache Kafka & AWS. Lenses delivers broad access to data with fine-grained controls whilst empowering data gurus with SQL capabilities for data flows.
Compared to other Kafka management tools, Lenses has unique advantages. Lenses allows us to create stream processors with a sql dialect with automatic deployment and scaling on our k8s cluster. It has a topology view which shows the complete flow of data through the Kafka cluster (topics, consumers, producers, Kafka connect, stream processors) in a graph with statistics.
Offset Explorer
Offset Explorer is also a paid Kafka management tool. However, if you're using it for personal purposes, you can use it for free. Offset Explorer allows you to view and manage Kafka clusters, topics, and consumer groups, as well as view and edit the data they contain. From the perspective of 2025, its features and UI feel somewhat outdated.
Conclusion
This article lists all the mainstream Kafka GUIs available in the market. Each tool has its own unique features, allowing you to choose freely based on your needs.
If you are using Kafka and are interested in other Kafka alternatives, we also recommend reading the following content:
Top 12 Kafka Alternative 2025 Pros & Cons▸
References
[1] A list of GUI tools for working with Apache Kafka
[2] Improving performance in Apache Kafka
[3] Overview of UI Tools for Monitoring and Management of Apache Kafka Clusters