Simple Kafka for Developers: Kafka UI Directly in Your IDE

Now you can connect to your Kafka clusters directly from your IDE - easily and in seconds, whether locally or remotely.

Developers love tools that make their lives easier. Whether it’s debugging, visualizing data, or managing clusters, the right tools can transform hours of manual work into just a few clicks. When it comes to Kafka - one of the most powerful but complex streaming platforms - having the right interface is critical. That’s exactly why we built our new Kafka UI Plugin.

Why a Kafka UI Matters?

Kafka is incredibly powerful, but let’s be honest - the CLI can be intimidating and time-consuming. Managing topics, monitoring consumer groups, or producing and consuming messages usually means juggling multiple commands, JSON payloads, and scripts.

A good Kafka UI solves this by giving developers visibility and control without sacrificing flexibility. It makes it easy to explore topics, understand data flow, and debug issues - all in one place.

What We Built

We wanted to create a fast, intuitive, and developer-friendly Kafka UI that helps you:

• Connect to local or remote Kafka clusters in seconds
• Browse topics and view partitions
• Monitor consumer groups and offsets in real time
• Produce messages to any topic with a simple interface
• View live messages in real time
• Support for SASL authentication and SSL
• Chat With Kafka - Ask anything about kafka with our AI helper

Everything is designed to minimize friction and let you focus on what really matters - building great streaming applications.

How to Use It

Getting started is simple:

• Download the Plugin
• Connect your cluster - click 'New Connection' and enter your broker address (e.g., localhost:9092 or my-remote-kafka.cloud:9092).
• Connect to your broker, browse topics and consumer groups, and produce or consume messages.

In a few minutes, you’ll have full control over your Kafka environment - no extra setup, no complicated configs.

What’s Next

We’re just getting started. Upcoming features include:

• Advanced consumer group analytics
• Advanced filtering for your streaming tables
• More connection methods
• Schema Registry – Manage, validate, and evolve your Kafka schemas seamlessly.
• Kafka Schema Generator – Easily create and manage schemas for your topics
• Kafka Visualization – Easily visualize your Kafka cluster and see your data flow at a glance

We’re building this tool with developers, for developers - and your feedback is key.

Why Aiven?

Aiven is one of the leading Apache Kafka providers for streaming solutions, and we're experts in the Kafka architecture. We bring together all the elements needed for you to move massive amounts of data with very low latency. Our streaming platform is ideal for event-driven architectures, streaming data pipelines, fine-tuning AI models, real-time analytics, and more.